XLV…

XLV

Bismarck said, lowering his binoculars:

"Lucky that war is so confoundedly expensive. Otherwise, one might get too fond of it!"

The King groaned:

"My Dragoons of the Guard!--my Uhlans, slaughtered in regiments! My infantry shattered--decimated--annihilated in Divisions. The bravest blood of France--poured out upon French soil like water.... Great God!--how shall I defend this carnage to the Queen?..."

The voice behind him said, ironically:

"My wife writes me ten pages every three days, urging upon me in Biblical language the necessity for complete extermination of everything French! Believe me, Sire, he who is guided by the advice of a woman follows, not a Jack, but a Jinny o' Lantern, that will inevitably lead him into a bog!"

The King winced under the gibe, yet he said, striking his clenched hand passionately upon his knee:

"And this shadow that we follow southward, this vision, of a Crown Imperial! What is it but an ignis fatuus that has plunged us to the neck in the morass of War? If the whole Army of United Germany sink down in the death-sleep, for what have we offered up the sacrifice?"

The answer came, prompt and authoritative:

"Your Majesty may leave that question to be answered by the sons of these men who lie dead about us, and the sons they shall in their time beget. If your Majesty's whole army must be sacrificed to insure German Unity, let it be so, in the name of Heaven!"

The King tugged again at his white side-whisker and muttered something about "sinful ambition." The hand that had wrenched the curb now offered sugar. The voice said, mellowed and softened to persuasive tenderness:

"I have served a great King. I aim to serve a great Emperor. If my ambition be sinful, it is at least not base!"

"Ah, Otto!" The King rose, and his hard, yellowish-hazel eyes were full of tears as they met the Minister's. "You have no argument so strong as your disinterestedness. For even your bitterest enemies have never questioned that!"

Something took place in the brain behind the great domed forehead hidden by the Cuirassier cap, the fierce, almost challenging stare sank beneath the old man's tearful look of love. The Man of Iron was asking himself: "Am I, then, so disinterested? ... If I am, why is it that these words have power to gall me so? Can it be that I have my price as well as others? I think myself repaid in Power for what other Ministers will only sell for gold."

The momentary embarrassment passed. He said, pointing to one of those long blue mounds of dead infantry:

"And who could see our soldiers advance under the fire of these French chassepots and the terrible mitrailleuses, and doubt that they have understood the greatness of the issue at stake. Excuse me a moment, Sire! ... What is it, Götzow?"

The aide-de-camp, in the full uniform of the Chancellor's own regiment of Cuirassiers, was white as his own coat. He gulped out:

"Excellency, I am charged by His Highness, Prince Augustus of Württemberg, Commander-in-Chief of the Prussian Guard Corps..."

The Chancellor's prominent blue eyes lightened so fiercely upon the speaker that he began to stammer and boggle in his speech:

"Terrible intelligence ... only just received by His Highness.... Yesterday Your Excellency's sons, Count Herbert and Count William, were in the general cavalry charge which took place at Mars la Tour..."

The great soldierly figure standing with the huge spurred boots apart, the hands leaning on the long steel-hilted sword, might have been cast in iron or carved in granite for all the emotion conveyed by look or gesture. The voice said stridently and harshly:

"The First Dragoons of the Guard were not involved in the struggle. Only the brigades of Von Barby, the 4th Westphalian Cuirassiers, the 10th Hussars, and the 16th Dragoons."

The ghastly aide faltered, perspiring freely:

"At the moment of General von Barby's charge, it has been unfortunately ascertained, a squadron of Prussian Guard Dragoons of the First Regiment--returning from a patrol, dashed into the mêlée..."

The Chancellor drew a sharp breath, but stirred not a finger. His fierce eyes, staring from dark pits that had suddenly been dug round them, paralyzed the wretched bearer of the tragic intelligence. He asked in a tone that appalled by its tranquillity:

"Have both my sons been killed?"

The aide-de-camp got out that it was feared so. He was thanked and charged with a polite message to the Prince. As he saluted and retired, lightened of his tidings of anguish, the Minister focused his binoculars with a steady hand upon that point toward the northward where the dark bulk of the fortress of St. Privat loomed on a hill-top covered with masses of troops and traversed by a straight white, poplar-bordered road, regularly trenched for musketry. He said in the same tone of composure, though his set face and the hand that held the glasses were wet as though with rain:

"St. Privat still resists. General Pape, with the Guard's cavalry and the Saxons, will find their work cut out for them in driving those French battalions out of the village below the hill."

He lowered and wiped the glasses with his handkerchief. The King said entreatingly, laying a hand upon his arm:

"Go, go! Find out the truth about your sons, Bismarck.... Leave not a stone unturned, in God's name!"

Even as the King spoke, German drums and trumpets sounded the charge; and there was a sudden shifting of masses of troops in the direction of St. Hubert. Then as a wave of dark blue men began to roll out from the deep woods that flanked the village of Gravelotte, so fierce a storm of cannon and mitrailleuse and chassepot began to beat about their heads that the unseasoned horses of the Princes of the suite kicked and plunged and the Minister said:

"It would be wise did your Majesty remove out of this neighborhood. These bon-bons thrown by Frossard's artillery are coming much too near."

"I will ride back--I will move out of the way," said the old man in great agitation. "But you, Bismarck!--you must go and see about your sons!"

He answered, and his great bloodshot eyes and sagging jowl were more than ever those of a mastiff:

"When I have seen your Majesty in a place of safety I will ask your permission to do so."

An orderly from Steinmetz, who now had his field headquarters at St. Hubert, arrived with an urgent entreaty that the King would at once retire.

The horses were brought. King William and Von Roon mounted. The Chancellor's mare had been sent to water; his orderly appeared with her as the King's party rode on. With a hasty word of reproof the Minister swung his great figure into the saddle, but the brawn and bone of his beast had not carried him clear of the threatened spot before a retreating wave of German foot and horsemen swept over it, followed by the thundering gallop of a retreating battery.

It was a sauve-qui peut, caused by the smashing fire from the French shrapnel and mitrailleuse batteries, and the practice of the French riflemen entrenched at the Moscow Farm. A general officer rode through the rout, laying about him with the flat of his drawn sword and swearing horribly, to judge by his bloodshot eyes, and purple countenance.

"Hares! Gottverdammt! hares!" he gasped breathlessly, finding himself face to face with a gigantic officer of Cuirassiers. "A thousand pardons, Excellency. I did not at once recognize you. Surely you will follow his Majesty to the rear?"

"Willingly," said the Chancellor, as a brace of French shells exploded, digging pits in the sandy ground over which the Headquarter Staff had passed. "Only, as shell does not fall twice in the same place, I am waiting to make sure." And, with a knee-touch, he put the brown mare into her stride.

There was a backward surge of disorganized infantry as the huge beast lifted herself over the yawning craters. But she passed through the press by the bore and thrust of her great shoulders, and the beast and the big man she carried were swallowed up in the roaring dusk.

Moltke, the bald-headed war-eagle, remained brooding his coign of observation upon the verge of the ridge south of Flavigny, his feathers drooping, his shoulders hunched, his sharp, hooked beak inclined toward his breast; his red eyes, burning with the battle-lust, staring fixedly from under the wide, hairless brows.

The sun sank in clouds of smoky gold and crimson over that country of copses, ravines, ruddy brown farmhouses, and white villages. Evening came down and dipped her wings in billows of salt-tasting gunpowder smoke, rose-tinged above and beneath by the reflection from the red sky and the red earth. The green Moselle was tinged with blood. Little rivers ran blood, streams and springs became blood. Wells were filled with blood, as in old time under the rod of the Lawgiver of Israel, and still the battle raged over hill and valley, common and highroad.

Flavigny village still smouldered, Malmaison was burning, houses and barns at Verneville were wrapped in roaring flames. Yet the gunners of the French batteries at Moscow, Point du Jour, La Folie, and the Quarries of Amanvilliers and Rezerieulles, continued to make practice of the deadliest; and still French cavalry charged the Teuton's dwindling infantry-squares.

Had not a comparatively fresh and vigorous Prussian Army Corps dropped in at the crucial moment success had hardly crowned the arms of United Germany. They had been marching every day since they quitted the Saar, those solid-thewed Pomeranians of the 2d Corps, but at Puxieux they had cooked and eaten, and now appeared like giants refreshed.

Not only Steinmetz rode at their head, with their commander Von Fransecky, but the Warlock in person directed their attack. Battalions that had retired in disorder reformed and rushed back to meet afresh the brunt of battle. Wherever the red eye glittered and the withered finger pointed, fresh swarms of fierce assailants were hurled against the dwindling hosts of France.

Down came the dark, and now St. Privat was burning; the village under the lee of the fort was burning--sending up great columns of livid smoke shot with licking tongues of flame. The day was over. But crackling lines of fire outlined the position of the rifle-trenches; the mitrailleuse batteries still spat death unwearyingly, as what remained of Bazaine's Army retired in comparative safety to the Fortress of St. Quentin under cover of that fiery screen.

There the shattered brigades and mutilated divisions clung like swarming wasps "with plenty of sting in them yet," said Moltke, "and the hive"--meaning the huge Fortress of Metz--"handy in their rear. But, on the whole," he added, "I am excellently well satisfied. My calculations have worked out correctly. Those Pomeranians of the Second Corps arrived just in time!"

And the veteran galloped joyously as a young trooper of twenty-five to cheer his King with the good news.

And can you see that other man, to whom Emperors and Kings and Ministers referred when they mentioned Prussia, who outwitted nations in policy and made wars at will, spurring the great brown mare wildly through the weltering darkness, with salt drops of mortal anguish coursing down his granite cheeks?

"Bazaine's right has been turned by the Saxons, the Guards have smashed his center, and the Pomeranians of the Second Corps have taken St. Privat and forced him to retreat, leaving Germany master of the field. Success has crowned beyond hope the arms of the Fatherland, but where are the sons who called me father? ... Is this Thy judgment upon one through whom so many fathers are sonless, O my offended God?"

Perhaps he groaned forth such words as these, as he bucketed the great brown mare through the perilous darkness, over roads bestrewn with helmets, swords, and cuirasses, knapsacks, talpacks, forage-caps, and schakos, needle-guns, and chassepots, and camp kettles, as well as the human débris of War. The flare of a lantern tied to and swinging from one of the great steel stirrups threw a treacherous and fitful light upon his road.

Follow him as he ranged from camp to camp, questioning, investigating.... It was black night and raining heavily when a gleam of hope dawned upon the man.

The cavalry piquet-officer who had given the clue beheld the great brute and her huge rider vanish in a cloud of their own steam. A furious clatter of hoofs came back out of the welter ing darkness, as the flaring lantern, gyrating like some captive fiend at the end of its tether, dwindled to a dancing will-o'-the-wisp and vanished, the officer exclaimed:

"Kreuzdonnerwetter! he must have a neck like other men. Yet he rides as though it were forged of tempered steel!"

"Who rides? ... What was that?" asked a brother officer, waking from a doze of exhaustion beside the hissing logs of the rain-beaten watch-fire. He got reply:

"Only the Pomeranian bear ranging in search of his lost cubs." He added: "I was able to tell him that he would find the eldest of them at the field-hospital of Mariaville, upon which he galloped away like mad."

"The field-hospital of Mariaville" proved to be a farmhouse on a hill-top near the battlefield of Mars la Tour. Candles stuck in the necks of empty wine-bottles revealed, through the open, unblinded windows, the figure of the surgeon in charge and those of his orderly-assistants passing to and fro.

"Have you a Bismarck here?"

The stentorian shout from the yard made wounded men turn upon their improvised pillows, and brought the head and shoulders of the bibbed and shirt-sleeved surgeon thrusting out of a window on the first floor. A colloquy ensued between the unseen and the medical officer. Presently the arbitrary voice interrupted:

"What do you call not seriously wounded, man? Describe the casualty clearly, without professional Latin, or too many crackjaw words."

The dressers winked to each other behind the back of the surgeon. He said, supporting himself with one hand against the crazy window-frame as he thrust his head and shoulders forth into the dripping darkness and gesticulated with a hand that held a probe:

"Excellency, your elder son has received three bullets. One lodged in the breast of his tunic, another hit his watch, and the third is at present in the upper part of his thigh. I was about to place the patient under chloroform when Your Excellency's call summoned me from his side."

The voice said, with a clang of anger in it:

"You should not have left him had it been the King who called. Go back to him instantly. I am coming up."

And he came striding in his great boots up the crazy one-flight stair. Ghastly faces of wounded soldiers turned upon their pillows of straw as that gigantic figure filled up the doorway. His shadow, thrown by the flaring tallow-candle flames, loomed portentously on the whitewashed walls. He wore no cloak or overcoat and dripped as though he had swum, not ridden, through water to his finding; the peak of his field-cap discharged quite a little deluge upon his son's white face as he stooped over the stretcher where the young man lay and touched his hand, and kissed him on the cheek.

"Never mind. Clean water does no hurt," he said, for he had drawn out his handkerchief to wipe the splash away, and finding it soiled with dust and powder-grime had returned it to his pocket.

The surgeon returned:

"I wish we had clean water--it would be above price. But all the springs are fouled with blood, and there are dead French in the courtyard-well."

"They must be got out and the well cleansed, if possible," said the Chancellor. "Meanwhile, a temporary supply must be found.... What nourishment have you, fit for wounded men?"

The surgeon responded, busy with a cotton-wool chloroform pad:

"Nothing, Excellency, except wine and a little Extract of Liebig."

The Chancellor said harshly:

"Yet this appears to be a farm-house, and I heard the clucking of fowls down below!"

The surgeon, who was a bullet-headed, obstinate East Prussian, and did not relish this sort of hectoring, returned, thrusting out a stubbly under-jaw:

"Excellency, there are certainly fowls in the farmyard. But they are not mine, nor have I money to buy. They belong to the unhappy wretch who owns this place, and has lost everything else."

And he gave back the stare of the fierce eyes that raked him. The Minister began to lisp, an ominous sign:

"Ah, indeed! ... May I--may I ask where you--where you gained your notions of the code of ethics that should prevail in warfare?"

Said the surgeon, fronting him fairly and squarely:

"Excellency, from my father, who was an honest man!"

Straw rustled under heads that slewed to look at the blunt speaker. There was a long instant's pause. Then the Chancellor thrust his hand into his breeches-pocket, pulled out a gold coin, and said, tendering it to the medical officer:

"Kindly pay this to the object of your pity for twenty fowls at a mark apiece. Now I will keep you no longer from your patient. Good night to everyone here."

"Good night, Excellency!" came in chorus.

He gave his brusque salute and had already reached the threshold, when his son, a colossal, black-haired, brown-skinned young trooper, who lay back upon his stretcher, staring sulkily at the smoke-blackened rafters, or contemplating the twitching bare toes of the leg that bore a tourniquet above the plugged and bandaged wound, started slightly, looked round, and called:

"Father!"

"What is it, my dear fellow?"

His great stride took him back to the prone young giant on the stretcher. Count Herbert said, barely removing his eyes from the ceiling, and speaking in a studiously indifferent tone:

"If you are upset about Bill, sir, there's no need to worry. His horse was shot under him, but he got hold of another. I saw him ride off all right with a wounded comrade behind him. That's all. Goodnight!"

The son nodded surlily and resumed his inspection of the ceiling. The sire, who had received the news in silence, went out at the door, stooping under the lintel, his great shoulders rasping the posts on either side. They heard his heavy footsteps pass down the crazy staircase. A curt sentence or two reached them, spoken as he went through the kitchen on his way to the door. Then he was in the yard, loudly calling for an orderly to bring a lantern. An instant, and three revolver-shots cracked in rapid succession, each followed by a significant cackling and squawking. The surgeon, now fitting the cotton-wool pad upon the wire mouthpiece and signing to his assistant to hand him the chloroform, clapped the pad upon the mouth and nostrils of young Bismarck, and said, with a dry chuckle as he poured the pungent anaesthetic upon the wool:

"His Excellency is having a little sport. All the same, without water, one cannot cleanse wounds or boil hen-broth."

Water arrived an hour later, two barrelsful upon a hand-cart drawn by terrified peasants, behind whom rode a trooper of Uhlans, accelerating their movements with prods of the lance. A general officer had sent the barrels for the use of the wounded at Mariaville. This service rendered to his son, he rode in search of his King.

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XLVI

He found him, with his Staff, not far distant from Rezonville, having returned there when the French cavalry of the Left withdrew after their tremendous charge. The King was reading dispatches, seated on a saddle thrown across a wet faggot, beside a smoky watch-fire. The farmstead of Malmaison, now sending up showers of sparks like a set-piece at the end of a display of fireworks, gave light enough by which to read.

Persuaded to take shelter, the old man found it in a deserted hamlet, of which the very name was uncertain, so sorely had it been mauled about. A crust of stale bread and a mutton-chop grilled on some wood embers furnished his supper. Water fit for drinking being unattainable, he tossed off a nip of sutler's rum out of a broken tulip-glass, and lay down in his clothes to rest upon the royal ambulance, within four walls and under a roof holed and gapped by shot and shell.

The Princes of the Suite, much to their Highnesses' chagrin, were compelled to subsist on fragments of stale sandwiches from their holster-cases. The escort bivouacked about the Royal lodging. Troops, wearied to exhaustion by the two days' continuous fighting, lay down to sleep in the pouring rain.

The Warlock supped with his personal Staff on ration-biscuit and raw bacon, and spent the night by a bivouac-fire, among the living and the dead. Can you see him sitting on the empty ammunition-box, buttoned in his dripping waterproof, his scanty meal eaten and his cigar well alight? ... How contentedly he listens while the bulbul Henry sings, without notes of accompaniment, his moving ballads. How piously he rises, bares his old head, and joins in the robust hymn sung by his battered but victorious legions, "Now thank we all our God..."

Or, with the mind's eye, one can follow the Man of Iron as, having bidden his master good night and left the young Hereditary Grand Duke of Mecklenburg to keep guard over the royal carriage, he set out, in company of his cousin Bismarck-Böhlen, a lieutenant of Dragoon Guards and one of the minor Councillors of the Embassy, in search of a lodging until break of day.

Sheridan, the famous American General, representing the United States with the Prussian Headquarters Staff, a short, alert gentleman of forty-five, with a dark mustache and chin-tuft, and a pronounced Yankee twang, followed, begging leave to accompany the expedition. The first cottage approached as likely to afford a night's shelter was found to be on fire.

"Too hot, though I like warm quarters!" the Chancellor commented. The next house was found crammed with wounded soldiers, all suffering from the excellent shell-practice made by the gunners of General Frossard. The next house and the next had also been converted into field-hospitals. The fourth yielded to the Minister's personal investigations a vacant attic, with three truckle-beds, provided with straw palliasses, tolerably clean.

Sheridan and Bismarck-Böhlen threw themselves upon their rude beds and very soon were soundly sleeping. For a little while the Man of Iron stood beside the narrow unglazed window in the attic gable, his great arms folded on his broad breast, his eyes, bloodshot and strained with gazing through the fire and smoke of bombardments, looking out into the wild black welter of the rainy night.

Those torn-up pastures and plow-acres, those devastated cornfields and woodlands, those burning farms and villages of Lorraine lay in comparative quiet now.... The hellish roar and crash and tumult of War had ceased for the time being. Its ghastly sights were veiled, for the most part, by merciful darkness, though the innumerable little sputtering fires kindled by the soldiers threw fitful illuminations upon grotesque, or strange, or terrible, or indescribably hideous things....

Hungry, thirsty, weary, and saddle-sore as any trooper of his own White Cuirassiers was the Man of Iron, having broken his fast at dawn upon a hunch of bread and bacon-fat, and supped upon a couple of raw hen's eggs, broken on the pommel of his big steel-hilted sword. But as his bloodshot eyes looked upon his handiwork, he was contented. This huge, vehement, and bloody conflict had established the mastery of Germany: France was outnumbered, out-generaled, and out-fought.

With frightful loss Moltke had attained his premier object. The Army of MacMahon had been driven in rout to Châlons, the retreat of Bazaine's Army westward had been effectually checked. The South road from Metz to Verdun, hitherto lightly held by the advance-patrols of the Prussian Crown Prince, was now blocked by the whole effective strength of two out of the three armies of Germany; weakened, wounded, and bleeding after the two days of desperate fighting, but still powerful, menacing, and grim.

One desperate effort made at this juncture might have broken through the barrier of living flesh and steel. Would it be made, or would the French Army of the Rhine fall into the snare so cunningly left open, and retire within the fortified area of Metz?

The gable-attic looked toward the great fortress. In vain his glasses swept the formless blackness. The sparkle of a moonbeam on a bayonet-point--the green or crimson ray cast by a Staff lantern moving over the ground, yet screened by the French batteries, might have cleared the point in doubt. Save for the sputter of German watch-fires over the recent field of battle, and the yellow candle-flare in the windows of half-ruined cottages and outbuildings, where wounded men lay on straw or the bare earth, no light showed, no life seemed to be.... He swung the shattered casement wide, and thrust his head out, gripping the window-sill, intently listening.... No distant roll of iron-shod wheels, no reverberating tread of countless footsteps; no other sounds, such as might betray the retreating movement of an armed host, broke the silence of that tragic night.

Only the sob of the wind and the dripping of the chill rain from the overflowing roof-gutters, came to him, with the deep ruckling snores of exhausted Divisions, and the strangling coughs and hollow groans of mangled and dying men and beasts.

All would be well, he told himself, as he shut up the glasses, unbuckled his sword-belt, and unhooking his collar stretched himself in his great boots upon the groaning truckle-bed, his heavy revolver ready to his hand. Moltke's great plan would be successful.... The King would once more prove his Chancellor a true prophet.... The hand that could build up Prussia from a fourth-rate State into a world-power, would yet hold the German Empire in its grip of iron, and through that Empire rule the world!

If He Who created the World had been displeased by Bismarck's ambitions, things would have gone less smoothly from the outset.... If He Who wrought Man in His Image had been moved to wrath by all this bloodshed, He would have shown it by letting something happen to the boys....

But Bill was safe, while Herbert was only slightly wounded. To-morrow he should be brought back to the hospital at Pont à Mousson and thence invalided home.

Reverting to Bill, secretly the father's idol, in whose person he saw his own lost youth renewed, the Chancellor smiled now, painting in imagination on the darkness a picture of that charge of the French square at Mars la Tour. According to Herbert, who had put the thing badly, Bill had had his horse shot, and jumped on another, taking a comrade behind him as he rode off the field.

A fine story to write home to the boy's mother.... How her deep eyes would glow and kindle as she read.... An exploit with which to dazzle fat Borck, hated keeper of the King's Privy Purse.... Nor must one omit to embody the incident in the next official communication penned to Count Bernstorff, Prussian Ambassador in London, who would be sure to retail it to some Lady-in-Waiting possessing the ear of the Queen. Lastly, what a magnificent anecdote for the convivial stage of a Foreign Office Staff dinner, or an official banquet, related with spirit garnished with exaggerations of the pardonable harmless kind. Indeed, with such embellishments he subsequently related the slight episode, proving himself capable of the very folly of paternal tenderness. The picture cropped up constantly among his dreams on this wild night of Gravelotte. And when the wan-faced Dawn peeped shuddering between her blood-stained curtains, and the reveillé sounded, waking the living from their sleep among the dead, so that their haggard uprising seemed as though in answer to the trump of the Archangel of the Resurrection--he heaved his giant's frame from the squalid bed to learn, with a savage thrill of exultation, that Bazaine had fallen into the trap.

In the dead of night, behind the screen of the unsilenced French batteries yet emplaced behind the high-walled farms of Montigny la Grange, La Folie, and from thence to Point du Jour, the bleeding Army of the Rhine had retreated to the treacherous shelter offered beneath the guns of Metz.

Said the Warlock, smiling in his sunniest manner as he made his hasty morning toilet in the shelter of a baggage-wagon tilt:

"Three French Marshals are twittering in this birdcage on the Moselle--one Army has been shut up with them. Another yet remains at large, with Paris and the huge resources of France in rear of it." He paused to absorb a pinch of snuff and extract a clean white shirt from a small and shabby japanned tin field-case, then added: "A France on the point of Revolution--an Army commanded by MacMahon, who has been badly beaten, and has that Old Man of the Sea, the Third Napoleon, sitting on his back wherever he goes!" He put on the shirt and emerged from temporary obscurity to finish. "If the spirits of the just be permitted knowledge of earthly matters, my beloved wife Mary is pleased with her old man!"

And he equipped himself in his old war-harness, and crowned his old wig with his battered war-helm, and got on his fine charger and rode off to meet and confer with his King, the Chancellor, and the War Minister, and issue instructions to his Chiefs of the various Staffs, trolling even less tunefully than usual, another verse of his favorite song:

"And knew they, the shining stars above me, Of the bitterness of my woe, They would come down and bid her love me, Pleading: 'Ah! do not scorn him so!'"

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XLVII

Rumor had it that the King, the Chancellor, Roon, the Royal Staff, and the Tinsel Rabble, with the escort of red, blue, and green Hussars, Guard-Dragoons and Uhlans, had ridden toward Flavigny.

The Warlock placidly followed, traversing the battlefield near Rezonville. Here bearer-parties of the German Ambulance Service, with Red Cross helpers, Knights of St. John, volunteers and French and German surgeons wearing the Geneva badge, were now arriving; and some progress had already been made in the gigantic task of separating the wounded from the dead.

The Iron Chancellor was found here, attended by his shadow, Bismarck-Böhlen, sometimes dubbed "The Little Cousin," other whiles "The Twopenny Roué," according to the humor of his powerful relative. The Minister was glancing through the morning's letters, his cousin was reading him extracts from the Daily Telegraph, a parcel of English papers having arrived. Hard by, squads of fatigue-men, aided by bloused peasants, were working to finish the second of two parallel trenches, in length some three hundred feet, near which had been collected a huge mass of French and German corpses, many half-naked, the majority of them still in uniform. Carts lumbering up with fresh loads to discharge continually, augmented the terrible mound of bodies, a huge percentage hideously displaying the effects of shell-fire, many in the initial stages of decomposition, hastened by the sweltering and oppressive heat.

Soldiers went about with huge canvas sacks, filling these with zinc identification-tags taken from the necks of their dead comrades, gathering a harvest of watches and purses, the former sometimes of such value, and the latter occasionally so well-filled with French money as to suggest that they had previously been taken from the dead.

"Ach Gott!" the perplexed officer of Pioneers in superintendence of the trenching-party kept saying: "More, more, and still more.... What is one to do with so many dead men?"

Some utterance of this kind reaching the ears of the Chancellor, he turned in his saddle and called to the officer:

"Your trench is too deep, sir, and not half wide enough. Three feet is sufficient. Lay them in as cooks dispose herrings in oil-pickle, across in layers and not singly and lengthways--labor and space will be economized thus."

"Alas, Excellency!" protested the officer, "will not such a method be very unwholesome? The churchyard at Flauville is already raised four feet above the pavement of the church."

"Let them lay on fresh dead," said the Chancellor, smiling grimly, "and stop when they reach to the level of the window-sills. Thus our good fellows will be able to listen to the Curé's Sunday address. Meanwhile, bury thick." He added, as Moltke rode up, pointing to the ground now trodden into mud and littered with French schakos and képis, Prussian helmets and schapkas, knapsacks, arms, under-clothing, accouterments, brushes, razors, and shoes: "Would not one call this 'Death's Rag Fair'?" He added as the wind, blowing over a battery of dead horses, brought with it an odor that made the senses reel: "Or 'Death's Perfumery Shop' would be as appropriate a title.... I must advise the King not to breathe this atmosphere longer, fasting. It might result in dysentery."

Moltke agreed, expanding his thin nostrils: "Truly, the effluvium is exceedingly bad!"

"Hypocrite!" said the Chancellor, openly laughing. "Do we not all know that the bouquet of a battle-field covered with slain enemies is sweeter to you than November violet-blooms."

"Both may be agreeable," said the old war-eagle, "in different fashion; as the partition of a conquered province, and the dismemberment of a truffled capon might afford pleasure of two kinds to Your Excellency."

Said Bismarck, as his cousin reined back and joined the modest personal staff of Moltke, following at some distance in the rear of the Commander-in-Chief:

"I prefer the first, if the second appeals to my empty stomach. Though we must not sell the bear's skin before we have killed the bear!"

He went on, patting the sweating neck of the brown mare, who had winced and started as yet another dead-cart shot out its dreadful load to windward....

"The King has been in favor of keeping the country up to the Marne. I have yet another idea, which may be too Utopian to realize. A kind of German colony--a neutral State of eight or ten million inhabitants, free from the conscription, and whose taxes should flow to Berlin. France would thus lose a district from whence she draws her best soldiers--one would cut her claws thus!"

Said Moltke, his clear eyes narrowing in merry wrinkles:

"And draw her teeth as well!"

The Chancellor went on:

"That the annexation of the piece of territory will give jaundice to the French is a matter of no consequence. Revenge should be made impossible. Even without annexation we must render them permanently harmless before we risk their bite. The surrender of the eastern fortresses of France can alone serve our purpose. We have bought them with the best of our German blood!"

Agreed the Warlock: "Many noble Prussian families will be plunged in mourning. Wesdehlen and Reuss, Wedell and Finkenstein have been killed--Rahden is most grievously wounded, and a whole crowd of officers commanding regiments or battalions are either badly hurt or dead. I can but thank Divine Providence that I have suffered no personal bereavement."

"I echo your thanksgiving," responded the Minister, "though some pints of my own blood have vicariously been shed."

"I had heard--I had heard somewhat, but feared to touch upon the matter," said the Warlock. "With the younger olive-branch they tell me all is well!"

The Chancellor answered, stammering slightly and looking straight in the other's eyes:

"Bill rode off the field in safety, carrying two unhorsed comrades out of the leaden hailstorm, one in each stirrup, Cossack-fashion, and accommodating a th--a third on the crupper of his horse!"

"Ei--ei! I had not heard these interesting particulars," exclaimed Moltke, raising his hairless brows in apparent astonishment. "I did not know the brave young man had distinguished himself so much! The Countess will overflow with pride and gratitude.... She writes regularly, I think Your Excellency told me? Naturally she would be solicitous for your health."

"I had a letter from her yesterday," returned Bismarck, "in which she mingles, in equal doses, stern admonition and affectionate advice. Thus, I am to avoid the French wines, which are known to be gout-provoking, and be sure to return in time for the celebration of our wedding-day.... While, remembering, however strongly Paris may be fortified, that the walls of Jericho fell down when the trumpets of Joshua were sounded--I am to give Your Excellency no peace, 'until the modern Babylon is utterly destroyed.'"

"Ha, ha, ha!" The Warlock laughed with boyish merriment, until the water stood in his clear, keen eyes. "Her Excellency, as I have often told thee, Otto, possesses a personality of the antique order. She is of the breed of Judith and Zenobia.... I would also say Boadicea, but for the Countess's known antipathy to the British race. So we are to destroy Paris, and what of the Bonapartes and Bourbons and Orleans?... Have we, then, no cut-and-dried instructions as to what is to be done with these?"

The Chancellor returned, with immovable gravity of tone and feature, belied by the amusement dancing in his eyes:

"We are to purge France of the whole lot of them. Though--supposing the Prince Imperial were to complete his education at a German University, and thus attain to manhood surrounded by German influences--Monseigneur Lulu might one day become a subaltern in our Prussian Army--subsequently to completion of the customary period of service in the ranks!"

"Capital. Her Excellency is indeed a woman in a thousand." And Moltke fairly rocked in his saddle with laughter, finally having recourse to the frayed cuff of his old uniform field-frock for the mopping of his overflowing eyes. "Thou must paint for the King," he gasped, "that picture of Lulu as a Prussian private soldier. Do not fail to tell him--it will be sure to make him laugh."

Said the Chancellor, shrugging his great shoulders:

"He has ridden with Von Roon and the Tinsel Rabble in the direction of Flavigny, where the French bombardment so greatly endangered him yesterday. Von Roon will be pouring into the royal ear dismal details of our losses, which are to be estimated for the Berlin newspapers at something under twenty thousand, including officers."

"Seventy thousand would be nearer the mark," said the Warlock placidly. "Nor do I regard it as a heavy price for such a victory as we have won. Roon, however, is not to be envied an unpleasant duty, which, for my own part, I prefer, when possible, to leave to other mouths than mine."

And leaving the battle-field they struck into a road in a cutting leading east toward Flavigny, and bordered with cottages shattered and scorched by shell-fire, most of them standing in gardens gay with dahlias, sunflowers, snapdragons, marigolds, lavender, and phlox. Every house that boasted a roof was full of wounded French and German soldiers, most of them lying on bare boards or earthen floors. Oaths and cries of anguish came from kitchens that in virtue of their solid tables had been converted into operating theaters; ambulance-assistants emptied buckets of ensanguined water over the gaily-colored flower-beds, while bare-armed surgeons, in blood-stained aprons, came to the doors every other moment to cool themselves, or fill their lungs with draughts of cleaner air.

"It is sad to see all this suffering," remarked the Chancellor, "or would be, did one not know it unavoidable!"

Said the Warlock, smiling cheerfully:

"Blood and wounds, dying men and dead men, are the inseparable concomitants of War. One takes them then as natural, and pays no heed to them. Did armies fight with truncheons of sausages, and dumplings stuffed with plums instead of iron shells full of shrapnel, there would still be deaths in plenty."

The Chancellor said, laughing heartily:

"And the Field equipment of our Army surgeons would consist of calomel and rhubarb-pills. Here now are a collection of soaked macaws and paroquets. The fine feathers of the Napoleon's Guard Imperial have suffered badly from last night's rain."

In two fields right and left of the road they followed were crowded nearly four thousand French prisoners, under a heavy guard of Mecklenburg infantry. The Mecklenburgers were drinking their morning coffee and munching Army bread and raw ham rations. The emerald, pale blue, and scarlet Imperial Dragoons and Cuirassiers, the white-mantled, red-fezzed Chasseurs d'Afrique, the green-coated Chasseurs à cheval, the gorgeous Guides and Lancers, the Voltigeurs, and the red-breeched, blue-coated grenadiers belonging to individual regiments, standing as if in the ranks, or lying down in groups upon the muddy ground where they had spent the last night, looked with hollow eyes of famine, upon their munching jailers, but disdained to ask for food.

"They are wet," said Moltke, "for few of them have got their greatcoats. It is the love of display that leads the French soldier to throw away what extra weight of covering he carries when he is in the thick of a mêlée, or suddenly called upon to charge. While our stout fellows will come out of an assault with what they carried into it."

"Or perhaps a little more!" hinted the Chancellor.

"It may be--it may be!" admitted the Field Marshal. "The French love for gold-carrying is the cause of that enrichment. Hence most of their Guard Cavalry officers carry beneath their tunics or in the pockets of their tight pantaloons netted purses given them by their women, that stick out in a tempting style. A prod of our German lance, or a rip from the bayonet, and out pops the purse into the soldier's fist. You would not call him a thief for taking what he finds in this manner?"

"I cannot answer for myself," said the Chancellor, turning a laughing look upon the speaker, "but I can safely predict that my wife would exonerate him upon Scriptural authority. By the way, I see that your brigadiers have not thought it worth while to place the French wounded under surveillance." He pointed to a halting procession of roughly bandaged casualties in torn and muddy uniforms. "I have already passed at least a thousand of these limping fellows in red breeches, and of course there must be thousands more."

"How could they escape?" asked the Warlock, turning his ascetic, hairless face upon the speaker. "And did they succeed in doing so, of what use would they be as combatants? All these you see, have they not been wounded by shell-splinters in the head or arms, or hit in the legs and feet by our rifle bullets? Why should we burden ourselves with the maintenance of men who cannot fight against us? and must be helpless burdens upon their country even were they within the French lines?"

"I admit the clearness of your Excellency's judgment," said the Minister, "even while I doubt whether, if some of these red-breeched rascals happen to be in possession of concealed weapons--there would not be an excellent opportunity, at this moment, for ridding France of Bismarck or Moltke."

"Or both," the Warlock amended, "with the aid of a double-barreled pistol. Look here! Was ever a more startling likeness between a dead man and a living, than is presented at this moment before Your Excellency and myself?"

And returning the salute of a young soldier in the white-faced blue uniform of the Guards Infantry, who in the act of galloping past upon a powerful if wearied beast, had checked his stride so as not to splash mud upon the Chancellor and the great Field-Marshal, Moltke signed to him to halt.

"That he is a relative of Max Valverden's," said Bismarck, "I would have wagered you a dozen of Moselle, of Comet vintage, if Your Excellency were not already inclined to bet on the relationship."

"I never bet," chirped Moltke, "except in boxes of chocolate and gloves with my nieces, and then it is a matter of certainty beforehand that the little girls are going to win!" And he turned his narrow, glittering gaze upon the object of his curiosity, who was now fixed in the front attitude of attention, immovable as an equestrian statue of painted stone.

"I will not detain you upon what is no doubt a pressing errand," said the Chief of the Great Staff, smiling amiably in the Guardsman's rigid countenance. "I merely wished to ask your name, and why it is that a private soldier of Guard Infantry happens to be riding an officer's horse?"

"Pardon, General Field-Marshal!" The statue blushed becomingly. "My name is Carl Bernhard von Schön Valverden, at the service of Your Excellency. Of my rank in the Army I am hardly at this moment certain, as I was promoted Corporal and Sergeant yesterday, during the action of the Guard at St. Privat and Amanvilliers, and am now acting temporarily as junior Captain of my company, nearly all our officers having been killed."

"I congratulate you, Sergeant!" rejoined the Field-Marshal cordially, "and am glad that you, as successor to the family honors of an officer who served the Prussian Army with distinction, seem likely to follow in the steps of your relative. Prut!--that was a close thing!"

"Hellishly so!" agreed Bismarck.

For the flushed and laughing face of Valverden had suddenly hardened and sharpened. With lightning quickness he had drawn a revolver from a pouch strapped to his belt and fired across the withers of the big brown mare bestridden by the Iron Chancellor. As the single shot rang out, another followed almost instantly, and the midmost of a knot of three dismounted Lancers, their heads, legs, and arms swathed in clumsy, blood-stained bandages, who had halted to rest by the side of the muddy road, yelled shrilly and pitched heavily backward, dropping, with the broken pair of clothes-props that had served him as crutches, a cavalry holster-pistol that had exploded as it fell.

Said Valverden, stiffening his features in the endeavor to disguise his almost passionate elation: "Your Excellencies will pardon me, but I saw the fellow was dangerous...."

"He might with reason," the Chancellor answered, "have entertained a similar idea of you!" He turned to Moltke, saying:

"Will not Your Excellency give orders that the companions of these would-be assassins--all upon the road who have witnessed the attempted outrage--shall be shot without delay? It strikes me also that more stringent precautions must be taken with regard to disarming wounded prisoners. The man had a pistol--that goes for much!"

"Certainly--certainly!" agreed Moltke, beckoning to an aide of his small Staff, who followed at some distance. He issued some brief directions, speaking in an undertone, then said, smiling and turning to Valverden:

"The late Count Max was an excellent marksman with the pistol. You seem to have inherited this talent of his!"

The Chancellor added, looking at the still smoking revolver: "You have there a pretty little weapon, apparently of American make!"

"It is one of Colt's six-shooters," said Valverden, smiling. "I bought it from a non-commissioned officer quite recently, and have practised with it in the trenches at the animate mark. But of the ammunition I got with it all has been expended save six cartridges, one of which I have had the honor to dedicate to the service of Your Excellencies."

Both the Excellencies laughed, Moltke saying:

"It would be a pity to spoil your shooting, Sergeant Count von Schön Valverden, for want of a few cartridges. Give me the caliber of your weapon and I will engage to supply you with a few hundred. And, as to your promptitude may be owed the priceless life of Count Bismarck, the silver-sword-knot must be the reward."

"Thanks, thanks! Your Excellency!" stammered Valverden, grasping the offered hand of the old warrior.

"And the King shall hear how important a service his newly promoted officer has rendered him," appended the Chancellor, "in preserving to the Throne and nation of Prussia the greatest of living strategists!"

"Under Divine Providence," said Moltke, devoutly raising his forage-cap.

"Under Divine Providence," repeated the Chancellor, touching the peak of his own.

He added, as Valverden, dismissed by a wave of the Chief's finger, his blue eyes blazing, his blond face aglow with triumph, set his borrowed spurs to the flanks of his late Captain's charger, and with a showy bound and demi-volte, galloped furiously away:

"He is as vain as Count Max, but seems to possess more character. I prophesy he will go far!"

Moltke agreed, slightly glancing after the flying horseman:

"Far--if Heaven preserve him from the clutches of such women as Adelaide de Bayard. Wouldst thou believe, Otto, the she-fiend spread her nets to catch that youngster, who out of dare-devilry prevailed on an officer of her acquaintance to take him to her house?"

"So!" Bismarck turned his large eyes on the withered eagle-face. "Did the meeting ripen into intimacy?"

Moltke replied:

"Sufficiently so to cause Valverden's family acute apprehension. One would suppose that she first revolted, then attracted, then charmed.... The Countess in the anguish of maternal solicitude wrote a letter to the Colonel of Valverden's regiment.... Fortunately the call to Active Service diverted the young man's thoughts elsewhere."

Bismarck said, smiling and smoothing his heavy gray mustache with his ungloved right hand:

"And, happily for her intended victim, an accident befell the sorceress, which blunted some of the arrows in her quiver of irresistible charms!"

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XLVIII

"Sad, sad! I had not heard. How did it happen?" asked Moltke, elevating his hairless brows inquiringly.

"Briefly, the affair, as its details have reached me, sums up in this way: Straz, the Roumanian agent of the Emperor Napoleon, having performed his mission to Prince Antony of Hohenzollern, met Madame de Bayard at a Sigmaringen hotel.... She is as clever and light-fingered as she is, or was, beautiful----'

"I know, I know!" said Moltke. "She sucked Straz dry of his store of Imperial secrets, but how, I did not hear from Your Excellency."

Returned the Chancellor:

"By drugging him--or so he vows!--she obtained those copies of his instructions from the Emperor (with copies of his copies of the telegrams sent by Prince Antony)--which I was privileged to show you later on. Subsequently, and in floods of artificial tears, she awakened her victim, declaring she must return that instant to Berlin. Which she did--a special engine having been kept under steam at the Sigmaringen railway station--in time to place the papers in the hands for which they were destined. The exquisite point of the jest is that Straz accompanied her--subsequently discovering how roundly he had been befooled! But upon this point I am not certain.... I only argue from the premises that when Delilah was subsequently found gagged, half-strangled, and robbed in her bedroom at the hotel where she and her Roumanian had put up--Straz--who had vanished--was the perpetrator of what Madame has since termed 'a mysterious outrage.'"

"He took the money?" Moltke queried.

"Undoubtedly he took the money, which Bucher had paid her a few hours previously. Twenty thousand marks in honest Prussian bank-notes. Some of them Straz changed before he left Berlin. He is now here in France, and that is all I care to know of him at present. But in the eyes of every man she now encounters, Madame will read something that will keep her animosity alive."

"So changed, is she?" asked Moltke, with interest.

"So changed is she, in spite of the aid of cosmetics, that as I looked at her I was minded to exclaim with the Prophet Ezekiel: Devourer of men ... thou shalt devour men no more!"

The speaker added:

"Unless vicariously, for the De Bayard has a daughter--not destitute of charms, if there be truth in the description given me by her mother, when the woman offered, for a consideration, to sell the girl to me!"

"Prut!" said Moltke, reddening angrily and frowning. "Decency demands that such vileness be kept hid!"

Said the Chancellor, shrugging indifferently:

"Decency and such women as Max Valverden's ex-mistress have long ceased to be on nodding terms. To do Madame justice, she flew at higher game than a mere Prussian Minister. Her idea was to influence a future Emperor, in the person of Badinguet's heir."

Moltke wrinkled up his transparent, arched nostrils, as though an unpleasant odor had afflicted them:

"Pfui!--what beastliness! what abomination! And the boy but fifteen, and childish for his age!"

"And cleanly of habit and thought," added Bismarck, "considering his paternity, and the sort of people who habitually surround him." He turned slightly in his saddle as carbine-shots rang out, followed by oaths, shouts, and in the distance behind them muscular blows: "The gendarmery of the Württembergers are carrying out your orders in a general battue. It should be enforced as an iron rule never to be infringed or departed from, that not only those soldiers, reduced to the level of non-combatants--who attempt to revenge the misfortunes of their Army by acts of violence--but those who witness such acts are to be instantly shot. More, the rule should extend to private persons: I would without mercy shoot or hang all those who do not treat as sacredly inviolate the persons of their conquerors!"

His deep-cut nostrils expanded, his blood-tinged blue eyes blazed under the heavy eyebrows, the corners of his mouth clamped downward, giving to the thick mustache a certain appearance of solidity, typical of the man, and suggesting a human mask carved in granite, or cast in bronze and colored with the hues of life. His resonant voice had the clang and timbre of a war-gong, forged of metal tempered by Pagan priests in blood of human victims. And he went on, his clenched right hand beating the measure of his words upon his solid thigh:

"I speak from the inner depths, at the promptings of a profound conviction. Strictness--unmerciful strictness--should be wielded, to bring home to the innocent and the guilty, the feeble as well as the powerful, the horror and hideousness of War. And yet"--his voice assumed a milder tone, the somber frown relaxed, and the tense corners of the deep-cut mouth twitched a little: "And yet wilt thou credit that during the frightful carnage of the last two days--there have been moments when my bowels melted to water--when Pity and Compunction have gripped me by the throat?"

"Ach-ach!" ejaculated Moltke, turning his clear red-rimmed eyes wonderingly upon the heavy features whose ruddy color had faded to grayish: "Thou wast unfed, or hadst made some rough soldier's meal that disagreed with thee. Man's stomach will upon such occasions chide with the very voice of conscience. Unavoidable horrors need not cause twinges. Besides, pity and compunction are felt by my niece Gusta when she has trodden upon her lapdog's tail.... I am myself agitated by these sentiments when Gusta exhibits to me her chilblains.... In War--especially a recklessly provoked war of attack, such as this--neither pity nor compunction can be tolerated. Grief of heart, I have been hitherto spared by Heaven's gracious preservation of those dear to me. Thou art nearly as favored, for the wound of Herbert is comparatively slight, and Bill--the hero of the astonishing episode thou hast related--has come off the field not only with four--I think Your Excellency mentioned four--rescued comrades, but without a scratch upon his skin?"

The simple, serious, almost childish tone of his harangue brought back the thunderclouds to the forehead of the Man of Iron. His grim mouth set, his bulldog jaw thrust forward, a dull cloud of red swept upward to his temples, chasing the sickly grayish hue. He said, stammering in his characteristic manner:

"Your Ex--Your Excellency and myself have, as you say, been spared the bereavement which will presently plunge the noblest Prussian families into mourning. But Heaven--looking down upon the Gorze Road, now white with the bodies of Von Bredow's Cuirassiers--or contemplating the field of Mars la Tour, heaped with the corpses of our Guard-Dragoons and Uhlans--might be inclined to disclaim arch-responsibility for the orders that in one instance hurled suss--six Prussian squadrons upon a French Infantry Division and the combined strength of Frossard's batteries, and in the other, pitted against eight regiments of French Imperial Guard Cavalry Von Barby's Heavy Brigade."

"Ei!" said Moltke, placidly ignoring the irony, but with a rosy heightening of the color in his wrinkled cheeks: "And Heaven would be in the right of it. Von Alvensleben in the first case, General Voights-Rhetz in the second, had been told in such and such an emergency to do thus--and thus. In the Wars of Joshua and David, as recorded in Holy Scripture, Heaven assumed the chief generalship. In the War of Germany with France, in this year of 1870, Heaven is pleased to let Moltke have his own way."

Verbal thrusts and riposte had the grind of edged steel on steel.

The Chancellor returned with elaborate suavity:

"And yet--I quote Your Excellency's own utterance, such use of cavalry as I have quoted has been condemned by Moltke as unjustifiable."

"And Moltke was right," trumpeted the indomitable veteran, "only you have not quoted me right. Such use of cavalry by a general is unjustifiable. Unjustifiable--absolutely--unless he wins!" He added, rather nettled by the Chancellor's criticism:

"Here we part, as I ride toward Gorze to visit the scene of Von Bredow's brilliant exploit, in the course of which, though Your Excellency has omitted to mention it, the French battery was cut to pieces, and an infantry column ridden down. Thus the loss of life in a military sense weighs nothing against the advantage!"

And stiffly returning the Minister's salute, the Warlock galloped away.

"I have trodden on Moltke's corns," said Bismarck, laughing, as his cousin Bismarck-Böhlen rode up to join him. "He grew testy on being twitted with our losses in cavalry." He added, as the low hedges bounding the road vanished, and the arena of the previous afternoon's conflict opened before them: "There is the King, whose face Roon has lengthened with tremendous lists of losses on our side. It will now be my business to shorten the royal countenance again. Roon and I resemble Ixel and Axel in the child's story-book, only that we manage better on the whole!" He explained as his cousin professed ignorance of the legend: "Ixel and Axel were possessed of a magical birth-gift, which worked in the same way, but differently.... Thus, Axel had a little finger that stirred sweet, while Ixel's stirred sour, only neither could remember to use his gift properly. Thus, Ixel would sour the coffee in the pot, spoil the beer, and turn the jelly in the house-mother's pipkins, while Axel would stir the sauer-kraut sweet and make sweet calf's head with cabbages!" He added, laughing: "If a dish thus flavored were now set before me, I should certainly make short work of it. Save for a bowl of the soldier's pea-soup given me by General von Goeben this morning--my stomach would now be as empty as the inside of Louis Napoleon's head!"

The scene of the Homeric battle of the previous afternoon, watched by the King, Bismarck, Roon, and Moltke from the ridge south of Flavigny, was indescribable. Blue Prussian infantry, mingled with Uhlan lancers, Dragoons, and mounted Chasseurs of the Imperial Guard, covered the wide stretch of level common-ground between the Bois de Vionville and the Bois de Gaumont. So high were piled the bodies of dead men and dead horses, mingled with that sorrowful débris of shattered arms, scattered accouterments and ownerless headgear, that live men walked through narrow lanes and crevasses opening here and there among them, and failed to reach the surface at the full stretch of the arm.

Bearer-sections of the German Ambulance were looking for survivors, burial-parties were collecting the German dead. Here and there the narrow lanes that ended nowhere had become crooked thoroughfares, owing to these efforts and the labor of bands of volunteers and peasants working under the Red Cross.

P. C. Breagh was one of these toilers. On the previous day he had helped the peasants clear the Red Ravine under the direction of the Gorze Sisters of Mercy, and darkness falling before the gruesome task was ended, he had kept on by torch and lantern-light until brain and muscles gave in. Then, staggering with weariness, he had gone back with the Sisters to their convent--had been dried and warmed, fed with soup and bread, stewed fruit and coffee, and had slept dreamlessly in the clean spare bed at their gardener's cottage--to wake, refreshed, in the light of a new day.

Morning had found every house in Gorze crammed with French and German wounded, and every able-bodied resident, willingly or otherwise, impressed into the service of the Red Cross. One single lady of the Sister's acquaintance, whose villa had been forcibly turned into a hospital, had retired to sleep off a nervous headache, setting her maid to guard her bedroom door. Which door, after an interval of trampling and violent argument, had been kicked open, revealing the kicker in the person of a Prussian General, muddy to the whiskers, hoarse from exposure and shouting, and red-eyed from the lack of sleep, who there and then forcibly ejected the hapless spinster from her bed, and telling her go and nurse the wounded, pulled off his spurred boots, and promptly installed himself in her place.

This was mild treatment, even tender, to the usage received by many other harmless non-combatants. P. C. Breagh had seen an elderly priest savagely hit in the face by a dismounted Uhlan, whom he had unintentionally jostled in helping to lift a disabled French soldier into a cart.

And he had been witness of other outrages. He had seen a wayside cabaret gutted, and the casks hauled up from the cellar, set up on end, unheaded, and emptied by a party of blue infantry-men. When they had dipped in and filled their water-bottles, they had drunk out of their helmets, and when they could drink no more, they had emptied out the wine upon the ground before the bush-decorated doorway, and with brutal jests and laughter watched the red stuff trickle away.

To this senseless waste the host had offered no objection. A blow from a gun-butt had previously knocked him senseless, and his wife, with her black hair hanging wildly over her shoulders, and her face blurred with tears and pale with terror, was trying to bring him round again.

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XLIX

The sight of the battle-field blotted out that brutal picture--made him clench his hands until the nails dug deep into the palms, shut his eyes and set his teeth, fighting down the deadly qualm.... It was worse than the Red Ravine a hundred times magnified. It was awful--inconceivably awful.... He found himself muttering:

"I wonder how God can bear to look down on it all!"

With difficulty he controlled his ardent desire to remove himself as far as possible from this attained vision of his great desire, by using the legs that had brought him to this hideous scene:

"If some of the fellows who gas about wanting to see War--as I gassed--not twenty-four hours ago--could be set down where I stand now, they'd find out, as I have found--that they didn't know what they were talking about.... Oh, God! ... suppose one of them saw that German Hussar without a head, sitting upright on a dead horse, curiously caparisoned with its own intestines, would he go sheer crazy or tumble down in a swoon?"

He who saw the thing kept on his legs and did not lose his mental equilibrium. We are so weak to our own knowledge that it is always a marvel when we find ourselves strong. He found the nausea going and the dimness clearing from his vision. He could even breathe the dreadful air, and, standing on the limber of a broken gun-carriage, stare out over the rigid billows of that silent sea of death and tell himself that a not inapt comparison would have been Deal Beach, with ridges of dead men and beasts instead of ridges of pebbles, and flocks of carrion crows instead of gulls--flapping heavily from one place to settle down in another and renew their dreadful banquet, between hoarse croakings that sounded like "More, more, more!"

Starlings in myriads were there, reveling in blood and fat like the titmice and robins, who manifested predilections calculated to divest P. C. Breagh of the last remnant of belief in the tender fable of the Babes in the Wood. Butterflies, Royal Peacock, and Purple Emperor greedily sipped blood in preference to honey-dew. Hares, rendered tame by bewilderment and terror, couched among the corpses of men, their natural enemies.

Toward the northeast rose a knoll, about which the battle seemed to have raged desperately. For it was high-heaped with bodies of the green-jacketed Chasseurs on the bony brown horses, and ringed about with Red Uhlans and Dragoons in blue coats. The black and white lance-pennons were whipping and flickering in the morning breeze that brought with it the appalling savor of death....

One had come to work, not to make notes. P. C. Breagh got down from the limber into the trough between two towering wave-crests and looked about him helplessly, not knowing where to begin. A bearer-party of the Prussian Ambulance Service pushed by him. They were hard-bitten, brown-faced men, who joked and laughed freely. A scared band of peasants followed, carrying auxiliary stretchers made of hurdles and sacks and poles.

Upon the heels of these tottered a single figure. Was it a young girl, or an old woman, so slight and frail, so bowed and blackly clad? A black silk veil covered the bent face, the small white hands were knitted across the narrow bosom. A white linen armlet with the badge of the Red Cross showed vividly against the sleeve of her plain black merino dress. The little, daintily shod feet that showed under the dabbled hem of the skirt had red mire upon them. Through the veil her great eyes gleamed, haggardly moving from side to side, restlessly seeking....

P. C. Breagh was becoming familiar with that look of strained apprehension and bleak anxiety, stamped upon the sharpened faces of those crowds of black-clad men and women who hastened from all quarters to seek amid the brute and human waste and wreckage of battle, their own wounded or dead.

She moved with the irregular gait of one walking in a fog, looking from side to side, questing amid blue and livid or waxen faces for the face, it was quite plain. Her look passed over bodies that did not wear the dark-green, silver-laced dolman, and silver-striped red pantaloons of the mounted Chasseurs of the Guard Imperial. She ignored faces that were young, and unadorned with the crisp mustache and the Imperial tuft.

For whom did she seek? A husband, uncle, father? ... What lay in her path? Something that, did the little foot strike it unwarily, might bring to an end that anguished search.... The impact seemed so imminent that his voice died in his throat when he strove to call to her. He got out in a gasping croak:

"Stop! ... Look! ... Right in your path there! ... For God's sake, don't touch it--it's a live shell!" ...

She swerved blindly aside in obedience to the warning, though he who uttered it had spoken in his own tongue. The edge of her skirt brushed the unexploded shrapnel, a potentiality fraught with hideous death. But she struck her knee against the wheel of the broken limber--would have fallen but for P. C. Breagh. Even as the slight figure stumbled against him, he knew the veil screened the face of Juliette.

"Mademoiselle de Bayard.... Madame..."

"Ah, it is you--it is you!" she said gaspingly.

And she would have dropped at his feet had he not thrust out strong hands and caught hers that were still knitted over her breast.

They were so cold, so cold and tiny. They stirred in his grasp like little half-frozen birds. She freed one, and put aside the heavy veil, and showed him what havoc Grief can make in loveliness.... She said--in the toneless wraith of the crystal voice he remembered:

"When you spoke to me in English, I knew Our Lord had not forgotten me. Ah, Monsieur Breagh, for the love you bear your sister!--for the love of charity--do not desert me! Me, I am in the greatest extremity, or I would not venture to appeal to you now. In the midst of these appalling cruelties and terrors I seek the body of one who is all the world to me.... For that I may find him living I do not dare to hope..."

P. C. Breagh choked out, crimsoning and stammering:

"Not your husband? ... You don't mean your husband...?"

She said, with a wonderful, pure dignity:

"Not my husband. My father, sir. It is since a week that I returned from Belgium upon receiving news of his captivity in the hands of the Prussians. The intelligence was false--I afterward learned. How--I cannot now tell you. At this moment, and in the presence of all these poor corpses, of odor so terrible, of appearance so frightful, I can remember nothing very well. But this--that I have come from Rethel since yesterday, and that I have come altogether alone."

"Alone! ... without a guide, or protector of any kind? ... Without papers?..." His face expressed the blankest surprise.

"A passport was obtained for me," she told him, "by whom I will not say now, so that from the Belgian frontier I might reach Rethel. When I quitted Rethel, I was given a military permit by the aid of which I returned to Verdun. From Verdun, in a train full of French wounded--in a fiacre part of the way--in a peasant's cart the remaining distance--I traveled: hoping to reach the Camp of the Imperial Guard Cavalry at Châtel St. Germain. But at Plappeville they detained me. A great battle was raging.... What thunder of guns, what fire and smoke, what terrible confusion, devastation, wounds, and death did I not behold!..."

She unknitted one of the little rigid hands that he had let go, felt for her handkerchief, and wiped away the cold drops of anguish that stood upon her blue-veined temples and about her colorless lips. And P. C. Breagh could only look at her in an agony of pity, and wonder at the courage that bore the frail creature up.

"Last night the frightful explosions of cannon ceased A poor peasant woman had afforded me shelter in her cottage, and shared with me the milk of her goat and her last loaf of bread. News came before day, brought by a wounded soldier, whose comrades had been killed, that the battle had been won by the Army of France, but that M. de Bazaine had withdrawn our forces for rest and shelter to the Citadel of Metz. I asked this poor soldier for intelligence of my father's regiment, the 777th Mounted Chasseurs of the Guard. The reply was: 'Three regiments of Mounted Chasseurs lie dead on the field of honor. You will find them south of Flavigny, between the Bois de Vionville and the Bois de Gaumont.' I cried out then, for the words had pierced me like sharp iron. I would have run out of the house to find my father, like a creature distracted, but that an ambulance of the Red Cross, accompanied by two English Protestant Sisters, passed through the village on the way to this terrible place. They brought me with them--'You cannot seek among the dead,' they told me, 'without the brassard of the Rouge Croix.' This they put upon me, and then they bring me with them. Now I know not where they are, but I have found you. Help me, monsieur--and I will pray for you until I die!"

She gave him one wild, supplicating look, put her little frozen hands together--would have knelt down on the bloody grass to plead with him the better, if he had seemed to delay. But he caught fire at her flaming eagerness, and snatched at the wallet of Red Cross necessaries he had unslung when he had climbed upon the broken limber to gaze over that sea of Death that spread to the horizon, crying:

"Of course I'll help you look for your father! ... But how to search for him--and where? ... Tell me ... the regiment and the color of the uniform?"

Shuddering, she pointed to the green, silver-braided dolman clothing of one of the rigid figures near them. He noted the red and green plume of the sealskin talpack, cut through, perhaps, by a stroke of the heavy saber yet gripped in the stiff right hand of a Prussian Dragoon. He muttered, even while mentally registering other details of the Chasseur's uniform--noting the crest embroidered on the green schabraque of the brown charger whose inert weight rested on its dead rider's thigh:

"777th Chasseurs ... I've heard German officers telling each other that they fought like devils yesterday.... Half a dozen regiments might have been cut up here! And we have to find one man somewhere in a square mile of piled-up bodies.... If one only had a bloodhound and one of De Bayard's gloves!..."

Love has a scent as keen as the great dun hound of the hanging dewlap. The issue of the search was to prove this. For an hour, as it seemed, they traversed narrow lanes that wound between walls of dead men. Then the ground rose to a knoll, topped with three scorched oak-trees that had been stripped of their leaves and lopped of their branches by the blizzard of metal and fire, still burning, the air expanding in their sap-channels, exploded with the detonation of musketry. Charred cinders dropped from them; they gave forth clouds of acrid-smelling whitish smoke.

About and upon this knoll of the three oak-trees the battle of the previous day had raged--the billows of the sea of Death had beaten fiercely. The lane became a crevasse, the floor of which sloped sharply--from the sides of which projected rigid limbs, human and equine. But the slender figure in black moved between them--stooped to pass under them, seldom faltering. When the young man who followed begged her to turn back, she shook her head without answering, and kept on. The silent gesture meant:

"Not yet! A little farther still!... Be patient with me, I beg of you!"

For it seemed to Juliette's tense nerves and overstrained brain as though those white or blue, or darkly-discolored faces, hideously distorted or wearing an unnatural expression of calm, were all staring with their glassy eyes in one direction, pointed out by myriads of stiffened arms.

She said, tottering with sheer weakness, and turning upon her companion colorless, black-ringed eyes set in a face most strangely peaked and shrunken:

"Here where these trees are I will turn, because my strength is failing.... See, see! O Mother of God!... O Jesu!... HE IS THERE!"

The scream that tore through her slender throat turned P. C. Breagh's blood to snow-water. He could only gasp, clutching at the folds of her black school-dress with a vague idea of holding her back from some sight of intolerable horror:

"Wait! For God's sake! Wait!... Let me!..."

She shook off his unconsciously violent grasp as though it had been a baby's. She was gone, wading through a languid runnel of fast-congealing blood, stepping over a broken lance-shaft and a horse's rigid hind-limb. When P. C. Breagh reached her, she was crouching on a patch of hoof-torn earth through which the limestone core of the knoll showed in places, hugging to her bosom a stiff blue hand.

It wore a familiar ring, that brave right hand, from whose grip the long cavalry sword had dropped when the Uhlan gave the death-thrust. But I think, even without the crested sard, his daughter would have known....

Madness was near enough in that fell hour to brush the bowed veiled head of Juliette with her tattered mantle of imaginary enemies. She saw nothing and knew nothing but that her father was there. She kissed the stiff blue hand, and sang to it and cuddled it. Ophelia was not more tragic than this Convent school-girl, squatting in the chilly shadow of a heap of dead horsemen, lavishing futile, foolish tendernesses on that piece of insensible clay:

"My father, now that I have found thee, we must never be parted again--never! Indeed, I have tried to obey thee--but I could not help coming back because I love thee so!... Thou hast been wounded, but I will nurse thee and cure thee. When thou art well again we will find a quiet home together, where my mother shall never come. For she is not good as my grandmother was, and as thou art, my own father!... I have fear of her, now that I have seen and known!..."

She broke off and listened, as though an answer had come from under the blood-stained Imperial eagle and the corpses that hid De Bayard from her view. One of them was the body of the young subaltern who had borne the standard. Over him sprawled the colossal form of a German officer of Dragoons. He was not dead, for he moved, and blood was yet trickling from a sword-cut that had bitten deep into his shoulder through the cuirass, and a deep gash in the close-cropped scalp of his unhelmeted head.

"Help! Some drink! Donner! how my head hurts!" he groaned faintly.

P. C. Breagh, judging it a case for practical Samaritanism, got to him by skirting the heap of dead and scaling it from the opposite side. Reaching the summit, he dosed the Dragoon with cognac, and was about to apply a first-aid bandage to the damaged shoulder, when the red-banded forage-caps and bearded faces of a burial-party of Prussian Guard infantry strung through the narrow alley below the level of his operations, and an unforgotten voice said in rough Teutonic gutturals:

"Hereabouts or near. Begin this--widening the way until carts can get through to be loaded.... Kreuzdonnerwetter! is that a dog up there?"

Another voice answered:

"No, Herr Sergeant. It is either a nun or a woman!"

The Sergeant thundered:

"You silly sheepshead! Aren't nuns women? But you verdammte Catholics think such wenches are angels out of the sky. Turn her out of that--nun or woman!"

With a savage rush of scalding blood to his sun-bronzed cheeks and temples, P. C. Breagh realized that they meant Juliette. He thrust his head forward, peering down from his eyrie. The crouching little shape in black looked no bigger than a big dog. Near her stood a soldier in the white-faced dark blue uniform of the Guard Infantry. It was the spectacled ex-chemist Kunz, who had nodded him civil farewell. Staring up from below was the copper-colored countenance of the too-zealous Sergeant Schmidt, not rendered more amiable by mud-splashes and powder grime, in combination with a stitched-up scar across the bridge of the nose, and a flamboyant overgrowth of beard. He bellowed to the ex-chemist:

"Speak to her! Ask what is her business."

The spectacled Kunz stooped over the little bowed head, and seemed to put a question. She lifted her drained white face, shuddered, then resumed her previous attitude. Interrogated from below, Private Kunz responded:

"She is deaf, or mad. She only shakes and stares at one!"

The Sergeant bellowed:

"Shout in her ear, fool! You are not courting your sweetheart! Tell her to get up and move out of this!"

Thus urged, the ex-chemist approached his lips to the little ear shaded by the black silken tresses, and bawled the order of his superior. She gave no sign of having heard. Copper-red with indignation, the Sergeant commanded:

"Turn her out, then! Promptly up with the baggage!"

Kunz, thus adjured, gripped the slight arm, not brutally. At the touch, Juliette gave a faint cry, and crouched lower, hiding her face upon the rigid hand she held. And P. C. Breagh saw red, abandoned his groaning cavalryman and leaped for it, slithering down from the summit of his dreadful eyrie with a roll of four-inch bandaging trailing in his wake. Casting caution to the winds, he shouted savagely to the ex-chemist:

"Let the lady go! Take your hand off! Damn you!--do you hear?"

The words, being English, were not comprehended by the Sergeant. For an instant he stared open-mouthed at the unexpected apparition. The next he had bawled out an order to his men, and P. C. Breagh found himself looking down the long brown barrels of a couple of Prussian "needlers," accurately covering the exact area of waistcoat behind which his heart hammered and bumped. There was a creaking of leather then--and with the jingle of steel on steel, the snort of a horse reluctant to be ridden into an alley without turning-space. Over the heads of the Sergeant and his party rose the pricked ears, sagacious eyes, and broad frontlet of a great, gaunt brown mare, ridden by a gigantic field officer, wearing the flat white, yellow-banded forage cap, black pewter-buttoned frock, white cords, and immense spurred jack-boots of the Coburg regiment of White Cuirassiers.

"Whom have we English here? Who called out 'Take your hands off!'"

From under the peak of the white forage-cap the rider's heavy domineering stare took in the huddled feminine figure, the disheveled young man menaced by the Service rifles, and the truculent attitude of Sergeant Schmidt. He lifted a finger, and the "needlers" became vertical. He beckoned with the authoritative digit, and P. C. Breagh drew near. And the sickening horrors of the battlefield faded suddenly from about the Englishman.... He was back in the tobacco-scented study of a house in the Wilhelmstrasse, Berlin. And the resonant tones of the man who stood for Prussia in the mind's eye of the world were saying, in Bismarck's well-phrased English:

"Even though you belong to a neutral nation, you should not presume upon the fact too rashly. Had I not been within earshot just now, you would have paid with your life for your interference. German military authority is supreme, and in the execution of its duty not to be turned aside."

P. C. Breagh retorted, tingling to the very finger-tips:

"Your Excellency, I interfered to save this lady from ill-usage."

"She is a Frenchwoman? ... Explain to her," said the resonant voice coldly and brutally, "that even to reach the side of a fallen lover, too much may be risked and lost!"

P. C. Breagh said, meeting the imperious stare with yellow-gray eyes that blazed tigerishly:

"Excellency, the dead man is her father, Colonel de Bayard, 777th Mounted Chasseurs of the Imperial Guard."

"Stand back," said the domineering voice, "and I will speak to her!"

At a touch of the spur the great brown mare moved forward, breasting a lance-shaft that barred the narrow alley, terribly squeezing the Sergeant and his men.

"Mademoiselle de Bayard!" said the authoritative voice.

"Excellency, she does not hear you! The shock has been too terrible," Carolan was beginning. He was brusquely interrupted with:

"People usually listen when I speak to them." And the curt command was issued--in French, suave and polished:

"Be good enough, Mademoiselle de Bayard, to stand up and listen to me!"

The big brown mare snorted angrily and fidgeted. He turned her head with an iron hand on the curb-bit, looking steadily at the other female thing.

"Mademoiselle de Bayard, do you hear?"

This time she lifted her sunken head, and turned her small pinched face his way. In the haggard young mask of frozen anguish two wild eyes glittered, tearless and stony-hard. Then slowly, as though his powerful will impelled her, she rose to her knees, and stood upon her feet before him. He said, in cool, incisive accents:

"Young lady, your father was a gallant soldier. I myself had the privilege of seeing how he died. I wish such a man had served a better master!..."

She answered, her white lips barely moving as they framed the sentence:

"He served the Master of Kings and Emperors, before Whom he stands now!"

His somber eyes lightened suddenly as though in irritation. He said in tones that had the clang of overbearing authority:

"I cannot enter now into a theological discussion. The battle-field is no place for debate, or for unprotected women and young girls.... In your own best interests I counsel you to return home." He added--and there was no flicker of recognition in the passing glance vouchsafed to P. C. Breagh: "Alone, if you prefer--or under the escort of this young Englishman.... I will promise you that your father's body shall be treated with respect!" His heavy eyes fell on the stiffened face of the Sergeant, standing rigidly in the attitude of salute. "Where is the officer in charge of this burial-party?" he added, grimly enough.

"Here, Excellency!" came from behind him. He glanced over his shoulder and said to the flurried under-lieutenant who had hurried up and was standing in the alleyway:

"A separate grave, distinguished by some mark that is recognizable by the daughter." He looked back at the daughter, saying curtly: "Your veil!"

She removed it in silence, and handed it to the ex-chemist, who received the frail fluttering cobweb between his finger and thumb. Then the brown mare, in obedience to the iron hand upon the bridle, backed out of the alley of silent witnesses, baring her long, vicious-looking yellow teeth and showing the whites of her savage eyes resentfully. From the florid bull-dog face of her rider, barred with the heavy mustache of iron gray, all memory of the little drama just enacted had been effaced, as the outlines of a sketch in charcoal are wiped from wood or stone.

But as the alley widened and his great beast surged round, switching her tail, putting back her ears and lashing out with her heels so as to nearly brain the officer, P. C. Breagh thought he caught the words:

"Separate grave ... marked to find easily. All respect ... answer to me!"

More he might have heard, but for Juliette's sobbing. For God had remembered her, and sent her tears at last.

She had suddenly seen, lying at her feet, a frayed and crumpled envelope bearing the Belgian postmark, and addressed in her own handwriting to M. le Colonel H. A. A. de Bayard, Headquarters of the 777th Mounted Chasseurs of the Guard Imperial with the Army of France, at Metz. And the intuition of love told her that the dead man must have carried this, the last message received from his daughter, hidden in his bosom; and have drawn it forth and kissed it--as in very truth we know he had--shortly before he died.

"See, see, my friend! Behold my own letter. His sacred blood has stained it.... His lips perhaps have pressed it!--it well may be that tears of his have fallen here also! ... Never shall it leave me until my hand is cold as this is! Adieu, dear hand!" She knelt down to fondle it, had to be raised almost by force--would have returned for a last caress--a final prayer, but that P. C. Breagh, rendered desperate by the evident impatience of the officer and the scowling looks of the Sergeant and his merry men, lifted her bodily in his arms and carried her away.

"I pray you put me down! ... Me, I am not an infant!" she protested. "See you well, Monsieur Breagh, I do not think it convenable that a gentleman should carry a lady so!..."

Then her strength ebbed from her and she became in truth, an infant. As her frail body yielded to his clasp, as her head sank down upon his shoulder, she sighed, a long, quivering sigh.

What of the youth who waded through the frozen sea of Death, bearing in his arms his worshiped lady? He was footsore and aching in every bone and muscle from long marches and desperate exertion. His heart pounded so beneath her cheek that it seemed to him she must hear it and be frightened, or that he must suffocate and die outright. Terror and rapture, exquisite pain and exquisite pleasure, mingled in the draught now held to his lips by Fate, Life's cup-bearer. And as he drank, with what strange birth-pangs, his budding manhood burgeoned into flower. He might look back upon his boyhood with regret, contempt, or tenderness.... He would never be a boy again.

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L

The smallest and slenderest of women can be surprisingly heavy, when carried in the arms of a lover who long has borne her in his heart.

Thus to P. C. Breagh, stumbling with his burden over roads strewn with weapons, accouterments, mess-tins, and water-bottles, boxes of biscuit and halves of sugar-loaves discarded by troops retiring in haste, the appearance of a very tall peasant leading a little white-faced donkey came as an unspeakably welcome relief. For a franc in good French money the owner of the donkey was more than willing to hire out his beast. Thus, seated on this humble animal, P. C. Breagh's Infanta returned to the cottage where she had passed the previous night.

It was one of a hamlet boasting the name of Petit Plappeville. To reach it they skirted the frightful carnage at St. Hubert, threaded the wood of Châtel St. Germain, crossed the railroad, unmolested by the Prussian patrols, and, following narrow lanes hidden between copses, came at last upon its single street.

Madame Guyot, stout, hospitable, and voluble, received Juliette with cries of welcome and open arms. Mademoiselle should have something better than dry bread on this occasion, for a neighbor had that morning killed a calf. Hence veal cutlet, fried in batter--for some of the hens, scared by yesterday's bombardment, had already begun laying--and an omelette with fine herbs. No less than young demoiselles, wounded soldiers require nourishment, and here behold, English Monsieur accompanying Mademoiselle, here upon the pallet-bed in the corner of the kitchen one of France's brave defenders in the person of my Cousin Boisset. Pardon that he cannot rise to salute you, for the Prussians have made it impossible. During the battle of St. Privat yesterday, my Cousin Boisset was twice wounded while serving with the Eighteenth Field Battery of the Sixth Army Corps....

Thus introduced, the gunner told his story, and told it with vivacity in spite of his evident pain. His bandaged head and the useless leg roughly swathed in a homespun towel of Madame Guyot's told their story no less than his nimble tongue and vivacious eyes and hands.

"We were overcome by force of numbers.... The Germans know nothing of scientific warfare.... Believe me, Mademoiselle and Monsieur, we swept them down in rows like ninepins painted black. At twelve hundred yards, and again at fourteen hundred--and the more we killed the more there were to kill. Name of a pipe!--pardon, Mademoiselle!--it was inconceivable! We were compelled at length to cease our fire because our ammunition failed us, and it was not possible to butcher any more!--Worst of all, our generals lost their heads, and issued contradictory orders!--Commissariat broke down before the ammunition-service--we had had nothing to eat for two days--then we ceased to have shrapnel with which to feed our guns.... So we stood in front of a wood in which we might have taken cover, being peppered by Prussian fire of infantry and artillery, for three whole hours!--Three solid hours, Monsieur and Mademoiselle--until we were remembered, and ordered to retire. When the order came, few officers remained, and not a single non-commissioned officer was left to us. Of the three batteries of our brigade Division, two-thirds lay dead upon the field. With my wounded leg trailing behind me, I crawled over rank after rank of bodies, pausing over many of my old comrades.... Then I lay in the wood till dusk, and made crutches of saplings I cut down with my penknife. With the day I reached my cousin's house.... You may say 'All this is War'--but what kind of War? is what I ask you.... I--a soldier when has fought and bled for France!"

It was the voice of Juliette that answered from the corner of the blackened oaken settle, where she sat huddled in the leaden stupor that is born of grief and fatigue:

"Soldier of France, I will try to answer your question.... I am young and ignorant, but I have read and thought much. And now I have experienced what never can be forgotten.... I have sat by the corpse of my father on the battlefield.... I have looked in the face of the great man who is my country's cruel enemy...."

Madame Guyot, who was frying a panful of veal cutlet, started and looked round from her sputtering, savory-smelling cookery. The wounded gunner, propped up on the pallet-bed that stood in the corner of the low-ceiled, stone-built kitchen, turned keen dark eyes and a resolute bearded face toward the quarter whence came the silvery voice:

"It is Bismarck's War," she said. "Stone by stone he has built up Prussia until her vast shadow has swallowed up all Germany. He has seen--this huge man of colossal ambitions--that the road to Power greater still leads through the gate of France. And Diplomacy could not steal the key, so War is the lever with which he opens it."

"Alas, Mademoiselle," returned the gunner sorrowfully, "it would never have opened while a French soldier was left alive--if we had not been betrayed! Have you seen the picture of Cham in last week's Charivari? It reached my battery through one of our officers. It is true--mon Dieu!--it is desperately true. There is the Little Napoleon of To-day dressed up in the old cocked hat and the tattered rags of the capote that used to be worn by the Great Napoleon. He begs at the street-corner for sous--and even the prostitute turns away from the impostor. 'The End of the Legend!' is written underneath. It is furiously chic and terribly clever--and frightfully true, Mademoiselle. For the Napoleonic legend is done with--finished, for good and all!"

She did not answer, the momentary flash of interest had died out. With her sad eyes fixed upon the ebony and silver crucifix of her rosary, she was murmuring a prayer--doubtless for her father's soul. Seeing her thus absorbed, the soldier glanced at her companion, shrugged significantly, and tapped his own forehead, as though he would have said:

"It is well that women have faith in Heaven. See!--she turns to her beads, the poor little one. She is able to pray!--that is fortunate.... Otherwise, grief would turn her brain!"

Meeting no response from P. C. Breagh, who sat upon a backless straw-bottomed chair in the chimney corner, raptly contemplating the small, sorrowful face, the gunner shrugged again, and exchanged a wink of intelligence with Madame Guyot, as she took the bubbling pan from the fire, proclaiming the cutlet cooked to a turn.

Who has loved and does not remember the first meal partaken in the company of the beloved. To one guest at Madame Guyot's board, the fried cutlet and tomatoes eaten from her coarse platters of red-flowered crockery, the home-baked loaf, the jug of thin red wine, the country cheese and the dish of purple plums that served as dessert, made a banquet worthy of the gods. To sit opposite that little drawn, white face with the lowered, swollen eyelids, and watch her brave pretense of relishing their hostess' victuals, would have been torture had it not been bliss.

When the homespun cloth had been drawn, the crumbs shaken out upon the threshold for the hungry poultry, the cat accommodated with a saucer of scraps, and the hearth swept, P. C. Breagh, glancing at the cuckoo-clock that had hiccuped twelve, and now pointed to the half-hour, got up and reluctantly tore himself away.

"You are going?... Back to him?... To make sure that those soldiers have obeyed the orders of M. de Bismarck? Ah! that is what I have been praying for! Our Lady has put it into your head."

She said it eagerly, with her hand quieting the flutter in her bosom. Of what else should de Bayard's daughter have been thinking, P. C. Breagh asked himself. He entreated, his troubled gray eyes wistfully questioning:

"You won't leave this place until I come back? Pray do not!... Promise me!"

The soldier, chatting in low tones with the good woman of the cottage, pricked his hairy ears at the unfamiliar accent of the English words. Juliette answered in the same tongue:

"Monsieur, I give you my parole of honor. When you come back to this house, if I am alive, you will find me here, under the manteau of Our Lady. May she protect and guard you. Au revoir!..."

P. C. Breagh echoed the final words, and held out his big hand. She considered it a moment, hesitated, then laid her own in the broad, blistered palm. As he shut his strong fingers over the fragile captive, it struggled, then lay still, throbbing like some small imprisoned bird. And a dimness came before his eyes, and he hurriedly released her, stammering:

"Take--take care of yourself, won't you? I'll--not be very long away!"

She called him back. He knew a shock of joy and hurried toward her. She slipped her Rosary into his hand with a gold coin, faltering with eyes brimful, and quivering lips:

"This ... to be buried with him!... This--for a priest to read the Office and offer Mass ... if one can be discovered!... Oh! if I might come with you!... but no!--I will not be unreasonable. Again, it must not be that you carry me, as you did to-day!"

He trembled at the poignant recollection. She went on, breathing fast and eagerly, lifting her eyes, poor rain-washed scillas, to his--laying her small hand timidly on his shabby sleeve.

"Me, I have an idea!... There is now in Heaven a great saint who was priest of a little village that lies not far from here.... Since he died, it is eleven years.... I speak of M. Jean-Baptiste Vianney, the Blessed Curé of Ars...."

P. C. Breagh nodded recognition of the shining name she mentioned. She went on, her small fingers pinching a fold of the rough brown sleeve:

"Sacrifice--mortification--the Cross--these things to the holy Curé were the Keys of Heaven. The poorest and simplest of his peasants was not poorer or simpler than he. Even before his death Our Lord gave him the grace to perform miracles, and always did Our Lady regard him with tenderness.... See you well, I will pray to the Blessed Jean Vianney to intercede for me, that God may send a holy priest to read the Office for the dead!"

Her voice broke, and the bright tears brimmed over her pure underlids. At the sight a wave of tenderness surged up in him, pure of all sensuous passion, knowing only the overwhelming desire to serve, and comfort, and protect.... He bent his head, and kissed the little hand, before he turned and went from her. When he glanced back, midway clown the wide dusty street of the hamlet of scattered cottages, Juliette was standing in the sunshine, looking earnestly after him.

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LI

She could think clearly and remember again. The confusion in her overwrought brain gradually subsided. She went back to the fatal days when the news of the defeats of Wörth and Spicheren rushed shrieking through France and Belgium, and the 16th of August brought word of Bazaine's intercepted retreat from Metz. That day a young girl, sitting under the grisly wing of Madame Tessier at the table d'hôte of the Hôtel de Flandre, in Brussels, had risen up as pale as death and hurried from the room.

The picture was clear-cut, definite as a photograph. She saw the tables in confusion.... French guests uprising, the men exclaiming, and the ladies in tears,--Belgians sympathizing--Teutons exchanging congratulatory eye-glances, and smiles not at all concealed. As the white girl passed the chair from which a German cavalry officer had risen, he whipped the obstacle out of her way with an ogle and a bow. And Juliette, covering her eyes as though the sight of him scorched them, had fled past him.... As she quitted the salle à manger, the voice of Madame Tessier had reached her, saying grimly to the dandy:

"A civility from one of your nation at such a moment is an insult, Monsieur."

And Madame, with bristling mustaches, had also risen, and gone in search of her daughter-in-law elect, to be arrested at the foot of the grand staircase by a waiter with the intelligence that Mademoiselle had gone to her room to lie down, and begged not to be disturbed.... To which apartment, it being on the third floor, Madame Tessier--having wound up the twelve-o'clock déjeuner of hot meats and vegetables and salad with coffee and pastry,--did not follow her. Had she braved the ascent, this story would have ended in quite a different way.

Upon this day, that saw the battle of Mars la Tour, Juliette would not have met the elegant, self-possessed, ingratiating lady who had spoken to her so amiably on the previous afternoon. When--Madame Tessier being engaged in changing a French billet de banque into Belgian money--Juliette had inquired for letters at the bureau.

"'Mademoiselle de Bayard.' ... Unhappily there is not a single letter for Mademoiselle de Bayard..." had said the curled and whiskered functionary, taking an envelope from compartment "B" of the green baize-covered letter-rack, and handing it to this lady, who stood immediately behind.

Juliette had found it impossible not to see the address upon this letter:

"To MADAME DE BATE, "HÔTEL DE FLANDRE, "BRUSSELS,"

written in rather a vulgar scrawl. It carried extra stamps, and looked bulky. And the elegantly-gloved hand that was extended to take it, recoiled from the contact as though the envelope had concealed a scorpion.

The owner of the hand had regarded Mademoiselle de Bayard with a piercing and exhaustive scrutiny, even as she slipped the letter into a gold-mounted reticule, and snapped the spring tight. She had observed in soft and well-bred accents:

"Letters from one we love are enhanced in value, when the writer must lay down the sword to use the pen...."

Through a black lace veil so thickly flowered as to suggest a mask, a pair of brilliant eyes glittered at Juliette. What dazzling teeth were revealed by the crimson lips that smiled.... The well-bred voice added, with an entrancing touch of melancholy:

"Under other circumstances, to address Mademoiselle would be held a liberty--the speaker being a stranger. Yet as the wife of a French officer of the Imperial Guard,--I may be pardoned for presuming in my young country-woman an anxiety similar to my own?..."

"Ah, Madame," Juliette had said impulsively, "who is there would not pardon you?"

And she had looked with a young girl's honest admiration at the sumptuous form in the perfectly-appointed dress. When the lady had said, with brilliant eyes fixed on her:

"Were this letter not from my husband, I could wish it had been for you," she continued: "Does Mademoiselle know M. de Baye's regiment? The 777th Mounted Chasseurs...?"

"My father commands it, Madame," Juliette had proudly answered. And an animated conversation would have sprung from this answer, but Madame Tessier turned round rather sharply, and the lady, with a slight, graceful inclination, had glided rather rapidly away.

Later, Juliette had encountered Madame de Baye upon the staircase, and had received another of her brilliant glances, and another of her entrancing smiles. And, being lonely in this strange land, and athirst for interest and companionship, the young girl had woven a little romance out of this passing acquaintanceship.

Now as she reached her room, trembling and ready to sink with excitement and agitation, a woman stopped her in the corridor, who looked like a lady's maid of the better class. Well mannered, smart and discreet, she dropped Mademoiselle de Bayard an ingratiating curtsey, handing her at the same time a little three-cornered note.

As the messenger plainly waited for an answer, Juliette unfolded the delicately perfumed cocked-hat. This is what she read in a finely-pointed feminine caligraphy, with lasso-loops to all the "g's," "y's," and "h's," and "s's" of the prolonged, old-fashioned kind.

The maid had penned it at the dictation of her mistress, who for an unexplained reason preferred another hand to bait her hook. This is what Juliette read between her heart-beats, striving to check her flowing tears, and the sobs that rose in her throat:

"To you, Mademoiselle, so spirituelle, gentille and amiable, I am fated, alas! to cause the greatest grief. I have received the most terrible news of my husband's regiment. The reports of the Emperor's resignation are false from the beginning. The Army of Metz, Mademoiselle, has encountered Prussian forces.... Where I know not, but with terrible loss! My Victor has been dangerously wounded and conveyed to hospital at Metz. I fly thither on the wings of anxiety and tenderness to receive too possibly! his final kiss. Also I learn that M. le Colonel de Bayard has been taken prisoner.... My pen trembles as I write the words.

"Since I may not tender them personally, receive, Mademoiselle, my condolences and farewells. May Heaven protect you!

"Distractedly and devotedly, "A. DE BATE."

Madame was packing, said the maid upon whom Juliette turned with a breathless inquiry. Without doubt Madame would receive Mademoiselle.... And, having previously been primed with instructions, Mariette, whom not so long ago we encountered in Berlin, conducted Mademoiselle to a door upon the lower landing, and having knocked discreetly ushered the young lady in.

It was a bedroom crowded with trunks and imperials, none of which seemed to have been unpacked. The lovely lady of the veil was standing near the toilette-table in a thoughtful pose which did justice to her figure and the beauty of her profile. She had removed her veil and held it in her hand, as she changed the position of a jeweled comb in her hair.... She looked round as the door opened. Her brilliant eyes, ruddy-brown as Persian sard or Brazilian tourmaline, encountered the tearful eyes of Juliette. She advanced to meet the girl with effusive tenderness, crying:

"Alas, poor little one! From my heart I pity you!..."

She was not so beautiful, unveiled, as she had appeared behind her mask of black lace flowers. The handsome eyes were bloodshot and too prominent. There were faint dusky-red streaks showing through the purchased roses and lilies of her complexion; horizontal marks, resembling the congenital disfigurement known as "port-wine stain." And withal she was an attractive woman of fascinating manners. And her sympathy seemed genuine, and yet--for some incomprehensible reason, Juliette trembled at and shrank from her touch....

"You are too good to receive me--you who are also suffering!..." She tried to collect herself, and not cause distress. "How I pity you I cannot tell you! but at least you have the knowledge that you are returning to your husband's bedside. You will have the sad consolation of seeing him, while I..."

She broke down and sobbed, and the sympathetic Adelaide administered red lavender on sugar, while her maid kept guard on the landing to intercept Madame Tessier should she appear. The cock-and-bull story told the girl would hardly have borne the test of recital before a third person. But Juliette was young, and innocent and unsuspecting, and Adelaide was experienced in the ways of the world, and very old in guile....

"Courage, my child, and above all, have faith in Heaven!" It did not at all suit her voluptuous type, the heroic-pious tone.... "Naturally you will, knowing M. le Colonel a prisoner, leave nothing undone to assuage the miseries of his situation!... Have I guessed right? I venture to think I have!" She patted Juliette's hand and smiled in the drowned blue eyes, from which she gently drew the little soaked handkerchief. "Accompanied by your venerable protectress, you will instantly return to France. You will leave no stone unturned to obtain an interview with the Emperor--you will implore him on your knees to obtain M. le Colonel's exchange.... Presto! the Emperor will set the machinery in motion. He will give back three Officers to the King of Prussia--and Mademoiselle will have her father again! Is it not so, tell me, my little one?"

She held the girl's small hands in hers, and as she marked off each item of her program, she gently clapped the hands together, as in approval or consent. It was a characteristic trick with Adelaide when she meant to be playfully coaxing, and there was imprudence in employing it now. But with the first inchoate stirring of memory in Juliette, caution reawakened in Madame de Bayard. She released the hands, and said in a graver tone:

"Your gouvernante will not object to return?"

Juliette responded:

"Dear Madame, that lady is not my instructress. She is the excellent Madame Tessier, my grandmother's oldest friend."

Adelaide's lip wore the expression of one who sniffs at physic. Had she not been deafened with the recounted virtues of this very Madame Tessier! As she racked her memory for the date of a possible meeting, Juliette continued:

"She is very kind to me. But I fear she will not consent to return to France immediately. She is now upon her way to Mons-sur-Trouille to attend the wedding of her only son. All has been arranged. It is to take place upon the 22d."

A sigh heaved her breast, and her eyelids sank under the burning gaze of Adelaide. But Adelaide was still engaged with Madame Tessier:

"If she has seen me once--and it may well be once!--she certainly has forgotten me!" she commented mentally. Aloud she said:

"But you, Mademoiselle--you are free to return to our beloved country. Under my own guardianship if you will. Do not refuse!... Grant me the privilege!"

Juliette panted:

"Oh, if I might accept!... But this marriage is the obstacle! Because M. Tessier could not return to France for it, my father commanded that I should go. All the more urgently that War had been declared with Prussia, and the regiment had been ordered to join the Imperial Army at Metz."

Madame Adelaide repeated scoffingly:

"This marriage ... this marriage.... Is your presence necessary to legalize the ceremony?"

Juliette cried, opening wide her eyes:

"Alas! yes, Madame!--for I am to be the bride!..."

A shock visibly passed through the nerves of the woman who heard her. She started in her chair and grew livid underneath her powder and rouge. And the dusky marks on her fair skin started into sinister prominence. She was suddenly terrible, and haggard and old....

"So, that was de Bayard's plot.... To marry her!" Adelaide heard an inward voice saying. "Why did you not foresee that, knowing her of age? Nineteen--though she looks like a child, almost.... Her grandmother possessed that physique of an infant, in combination with an iron determination, and a regard of truth that robbed Life of every alleviation, deprived conversation of grace and versatility--reduced the very language of Love to the level of a notary's précis...."

All this passed through her brain in an instant. She controlled herself, rose, took the girl's hands again, and kissed her on the brow, saying with sorrowful melodiousness:

"My child, I comprehend! But while I rejoice at the happiness that awaits the daughter, I weep--forgive me that I weep!--for the father in his prison-cell. He is handsome, thy betrothed--and brave--and not a soldier? In a day like this when our France cries out for men?"

Juliette clenched her little hands as the languid irony stabbed her. She cried out, almost beside herself:

"Oh, that is what I feel, and for that I cannot pardon him! Why is he not a soldier? One could esteem him if he were! But oh! Madame,--I despise him, and that makes it the more terrible.... This marriage with a husband whom I have never even seen!"

"Ah, ha!..." she heard a strange voice scream through peals of laughter. "Ah, la, la!--what a clumsy game to play!... Fi donc, M. le Colonel!... So we were to be married in the style of the Old Commander.... 'Pas files a droite!... To the church, quick march!' Mon Dieu! Mon Dieu! how droll!..."

She dabbed her eyes with her handkerchief, and said, controlling her frantic merriment:

"Sweet child, forgive me, I am a little hysterical.... The shock of Victor's wound ... my sympathy with your cruel situation.... How could M. le Colonel subject you to a trial so severe?" Feeling herself upon unsafe ground, she dried her eyes again and amended. "That, I comprehend, is a question between yourselves.... When this wedding was arranged M. le Colonel had no comprehension of what would befall him. Yet, for his sake, would it not be wise to delay? Engage the interest of the Emperor before it is too late to reach the beloved captive. Should he be interned in some fortress of East Prussia, how will even a daughter's tenderness reach him amidst those desolate plains--in those caverns of freezing stone!..."

She used her fine voice like a consummate artist of the theater.... Juliette had a vision of her father dying, fettered, ghastly and gaunt with famine, as an engraving of Count Ugolino in his dungeon she remembered to have somewhere seen.... And her secret horror of Charles Tessier, wedded with the feverish longing to return to France and work for the release of her dear prisoner, prompted her to decision now....

"I will go with you, since you are good enough to propose it. But Madame Tessier will never give her consent. Therefore, we must leave here without consulting her, and secretly.... I will write a letter explaining all. Money I have for the railway charges, not much, but I think sufficient!"

Said Adelaide, barely able to hide her triumph:

"Leave the purchase of the tickets to me, ma mignonne! I have a pretty little score to settle with M. le Colonel. We will settle our accounts presently, I promise you! What is the matter now?"

Juliette gasped:

"Alas!--I have no passport! At least, Madame Tessier has both ours...."

"Ah, bah!" said Adelaide. "We will borrow Mariette's.... She can remain here at pasture, and amuse herself with the waiters!..." She burst out laughing at Juliette's look of astonishment, and tapped her under the chin, telling her to go to her room, pack a small hand-bag with necessary articles, change into a dark, plain walking-dress, and rejoin her as soon as might be. She showed a small watch, its back thickly crusted with emeralds, saying:

"Hurry!... You have barely a quarter of an hour."

Then she opened the door, sped her capture with a beaming smile, beckoned Mariette, and this strange colloquy took place between Circe and her tirewoman:

"Did the old woman come nosing upstairs after the little Mademoiselle joined me?"

Mariette replied:

"She did, Madame, but I had locked both Mademoiselle's doors--that leading into the old lady's room, and the one that opens on the corridor,--and put the keys in my pocket. Here they are!"

She held them up, her sallow features expressive with the expectation of a reward earned by intelligence. Said Adelaide, impatiently tapping her handsome foot:

"And then?... And then?..."

"Then I accidentally encountered Madame on the threshold of Mademoiselle's apartment. Seeing her about to knock, I told her that I had seen the young lady descend the stairs, carrying a letter, which I supposed Mademoiselle intended to post at the pillar in the vestibule.... Hearing this the old lady thanked me, and bundled downstairs. She is asthmatic, judging by her wheezing.... She will wait a bit before she climbs up all these flights again."

Adelaide thought a moment, and then gave orders.

"Run you down, hunt up the old woman--help her to search everywhere for the little thing--you understand!... Half an hour will be sufficient to detain her below stairs. In less time Mademoiselle will be safe with me in my apartment.... Then you will give Madame these keys and a little note written by Mademoiselle.... Or--do you know of a waiter who would undertake to do this and hold his tongue?"

Mariette's expression became sentimental. She said, with her head tilted on one side:

"There is one, a Swiss youth, handsome and with the form of an athlete, upon whose fidelity and silence Madame can implicitly rely...."

"For how much?" Adelaide demanded, having no illusions as to the permanence of an unpurchased silence.

Mariette answered:

"I will guarantee Adolphe Madame's for the sum of twenty francs!"

Adelaide gave her a bank-note, and the faithful creature tripped away to split it. Despite youth, beauty and muscles, her Adolphe only got ten francs. But he carried out his instructions and handed Madame Tessier the keys, with a little envelope, containing a hasty line in the handwriting of Juliette:

"Dearest Madame," it said. "This moment I have received grave news of my father, compelling me to leave your side. This marriage must be deferred. Entreat M. Charles to excuse me! I embrace and pray you to pardon.

"J. M. De B."

The little note was penned on the corner of Adelaide's toilette-table. While Madame read it and fainted,--was revived by Mariette and the athletic Adolphe,--scolded herself into hysterics, came out of them and dispatched telegrams; tore the telegrams up and wrote letters,--Juliette was safely hidden in Madame Adelaide's room.

Later on, when Madame Tessier had left the hotel, with her luggage and the trunks and bandboxes of the vanished bride-elect--this time containing the marriage robe, crown and so on,--Madame de Baye sent for her bill and paid it--ordered a fiacre and drove to the station, accompanied by her maid, and her maid's sister, a demure little person in black merino, cut convent-style, whose head was draped, after the fashion of some lay novices, with a black silk veil.

The abduction was effected in the simplest fashion.... Not a soul turned to look at the dowdy little figure carrying the hand-bag, its slight proportions half hidden in the sweeping folds of Adelaide's silken train.

The station was crowded with newly-arrived French officers, men of MacMahon's defeated army, who wore their swords, having given their parole to their captors not to serve again in the War. Belgian officers fraternized with them,--Belgian ladies of the Red Cross were busily engaged in making much of those who were wounded.... Juliette's heart swelled at the sight of the bandages and crutches, and when the laden stretchers were carried past, the hot tears streamed down her white cheeks behind her screening veil.

The train carried a great many French passengers, as well as an English Red Cross column and a Belgian one. When the engine shrieked, Juliette started as guiltily as though it had been the voice of Madame Tessier, shrilly lamenting an absconding daughter-in-law.

They were off--launched upon the iron road that led back to France and freedom. The excellent Mariette remained behind. She would sleep at some hotel, procure a passport, and join her mistress later. Madame de Baye took the trouble to explain.

From the shrinking little figure in the corner of the carriage came a muffled sound in answer.

"Let her mope," Adelaide said to herself. "Thought is necessary to carry out my plan!"

You are to see her as Juliette saw her, leaning her fair round elbow on the padded window-ledge, and thinking, as the rolling plains in the vicinity of Brussels gradually gave place to valley and hill. All of fierce and sensual and treacherous that mingled in her complex nature with how many nobler qualities,--showed now in the beautiful mask of Adelaide, even as she sat brooding there.

She had knotty problems to decide, it must be admitted.... How best to play this marvelous trump, her daughter thrown in her way by chance, was one of these. That plot of Straz, for bringing the girl into contact with the Heir Imperial, might be combined with Adelaide's own original notion of employing the girl's influence to bring about a reconciliation with M. de Bayard.

The indifference of M. de Bismarck had quashed her tentative approaches on the one subject. The silent contempt of de Bayard had thrown the other affair out of gear. To score off both would be magnificent.... As for Straz ... she lost grip of herself when she thought of the Roumanian, murmuring:

"For revenge on him, who has robbed me of my beauty, how cheerfully I would give my soul!"

Juliette, from her corner, saw the change and shuddered. Adelaide turned sharply, to read terror in the girl's face.

"What is it, my chicken? Has anything frightened you?" ...

The terrifying Medusa turned to a maternally-smiling Cybele. She leaned across the intervening space of cushion, to playfully pat the knee of her charge. But the answering smile was as faint as the scent of frozen violets.... The spell of her beauty had been broken when her demon had looked out of her eyes.

"My nerves are not as strong as they were before--what happened in July," she told herself. "And that is another debt I owe to Nicolas. He would be wiser to let me forget him--if oblivion be possible."

Her looking-glass bore out each day what the Roumanian had said to her. "Never will you be able to look in your mirror without remembering me!"

And to keep her smart alive, the Slav had adopted a method of his own invention. Peculiarly ingenious and characteristic of Straz.

At intervals Adelaide received anonymous letters, containing inclosures, wherever she went and by whatever alias she passed. Envelopes directed in varying hands would contain doll's mirrors costing but a sou or two. Pinchbeck-framed ovals or circles of tin or glass, always reflecting the same thing.

A livid face of hate, streaked with those faint brownish red marks left by the tightened folds of the silk scarf that had so nearly strangled her. She had tried to laugh at this childish form assumed by the malice of the Roumanian. But the deadly cleverness of the thing lay in the fact--that it did what it was meant to do. The medieval torture of the falling drops of water was equaled by this Ordeal of the Penny Looking-Glass.

"Look, see, and think of me!" sometimes ran the doggerel rhyme scrawled on the paper wrapping of the doll's mirror. At other times:

"Charms that are spoiled hold no men entoiled!" would be the motto, or something equally stupid, dull and banal. The stupidity was becoming unbearable by its very repetition; by the certainty and regularity with which the laden envelopes arrived. Sometimes Adelaide felt entangled in a cunningly woven network ... surrounded by spies, sleepless and unseen.... Yet in the maid Mariette the Slav had found an accomplice clever enough to carry out his purposes single-handed. The cream of the thing was--Adelaide never suspected Mariette.

Treacherous herself, she believed in the devotion of this woman, who watched her anguish grimly, planting fresh thorns in her mistress's shuddering flesh. And every day or so brought another doll's looking-glass. The jeer that accompanied the last had been a vilely parodied verse of the child's dancing-song:

"_Ma commère était belle! Helas! dans le temps! Ma commère était belle! Helas! dans le temps! Hélas! Pousser un soupir! A vue de ma commère: L'Amour n'a qu'à mourir! Hélas!_"

One may imagine the curl of Adelaide's lip on reading rubbish like this. But she read it more than once, and when she finally burned it, the accursed jingle, burr-like, stuck in her memory: for she it was who had been beautiful in the time that had passed for evermore--the gossip at the first sight of whose damaged, unveiled charms Love sighed and gave up the ghost.

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LII

Meanwhile Juliette, nestled in her corner, stared from the window as Belgium hurried by. Bouillon, at whose station they left the train, showed a platform crowded with swaggering Prussian officers of the Crown Prince's army--some of them wounded, all upon parole. French ladies, entering and leaving the carriages, looked daggers at their enemies. Poisoned daggers at Adelaide, who, to her secret annoyance, was recognized and familiarly greeted by two of these Teutonic warriors, one a tall and red-whiskered Bavarian Light Dragoon, the other a brown-coated Hussar of von Barnekow's Brigade.

In vain Adelaide ignored the pair and redoubled the directions she was giving to a porter. The Bavarian coolly thrust the man aside, opened the carriage-door and jumped upon the steps.

"Meine gnädigste ... loveliest Countess, you won't give the go-by to your old comrade Otto? Here also is von Wissman, who claims a greeting from you!"

There was no gainsaying the boisterous good-fellowship of the officers. They superintended the removal of the luggage from the van, engaged a pair-horsed fiacre, and advised as to its loading. When Adelaide and her charge entered they followed uninvited, and deposited themselves on the front seat, incommoding the ladies with their long spurred boots and filling the vehicle with the odor of cigars and wine. Both talked much; the Hussar chattered incessantly; giving details of the various actions he had been engaged in, the chance by which he had been taken prisoner, the irksomeness of being interned in Belgium until the ending of hostilities:

"Not that it will be long before the War is over. We now hold Alsace Lorraine and the country north and east of Metz. The Crown Prince is making for Châlons; that will give the French Emperor an attack of hysterics. He has handed over the supreme command to Bazaine, and yesterday left Gravelotte for Verdun. That means Châlons, and after Châlons will be Paris. Badinguet has had enough of campaigning to last him the rest of his reign."

Adelaide asked:

"And the Prince?"

The brown Hussar puffed out his cheeks and squinted like a pantomime-mask. The Bavarian replied:

"Lulu went with papa, though we heard they had trouble to make him. He wanted to stop and kill Prussians--they're such horrible beasts, you know!"

"You droll beggar, Strelitz, shut up with your mummery," said the Hussar, leaning across him to pitch his cigar-butt away.

"Madame is fire-proof, why waste the stump of a three-mark Havana?" chuckled Strelitz, keeping his own weed alight. He went on, drolling for the benefit of his companion:

"This meeting, loveliest Countess, makes me feel a youth again--garlanding the grim temples of Bellona with the roses of the goddess of Love. You remember the classical lessons you used to give me only last winter, in your charming flat near the Linden Strasse?"

He ogled Adelaide with comic sentimentality:

"And the jovial supper-party at which I was present, when von Kessel, of the Guards Infantry, had the presumption to bring an uninvited guest!"

"Why apologize!" laughed the Hussar. "The pleasantest acquaintanceships are made by chance!"

"Ah, but this was not chance!" said the Bavarian, with mock solemnity. "It was one of those accidents that only happen by design. Von Schön-Valverden bored von Kessel frightfully to take him--left the fat fellow no peace until he gave in. The Count is reported to have paid the penalty."

"Aha! I can imagine what happened to the youngster!" giggled the Hussar.

Replied the comedian:

"He had three losses that evening. Each one more serious than the last!"

Adelaide shrugged, but she did not look angry; indeed, through her veil her disdainful beauty assumed a smiling cast.

"Three losses," the comedian repeated, "exactly as in my own case. For he first lost his money--so did I!--we were playing baccarat that evening--then he lost his head, and finally his heart!"

"Otto, thou wert always a tease!" protested Madame, but her ill-humor had softened into conscious coquetry, and her eyes beamed radiantly through the flowers of her masking veil.

"Or he would have!" continued Otto: "had not his mother, the Countess, come flying to the rescue and carried him off, nobody knows where!..."

Adelaide's eyes blazed. She said in a tone of haughty nonchalance:

"Count Valverden is now with the first Army, advancing toward Metz.... He says he hopes to win the silver sword-knot before the close of the campaign."

"You correspond?" the Hussar asked, grinning, as the driver signified impatience by kicking the back of the box-seat. Both officers got out of the carriage as Adelaide answered coldly:

"He often writes to me."

The driver, ignored, opened a little padded trap-hole in the front part of the vehicle. He clapped his mouth to it and shouted in the Flemish tongue:

"Geef my U address!"

Adelaide gave the name of the Hôtel des Postes. The officers kissed her hand and said they would call there on the morrow. They waved as the fiacre rumbled out of the station. Adelaide waved back, and issued quite another direction through the driver's trap-hole. And the fiacre went jingling through the old-world streets of the castled town that sits on the broad flowing river whose bridge was crowded with French and Belgian officers, chatting, smoking and discussing the news of the War.

Presently they were free of the streets, roaring with the tongues of many nations, choked with trains of French wounded, Red Cross columns, Sisters, surgeons, bearers, carriages full of visitors, and more processions of officers on parole. The fiacre lumbered at a good pace behind its pair of heavy-hocked Flemish horses along a wide, straight road, with plains on either side. And presently tall black wooden observation-towers marked the frontier where Belgian videttes and outposts amicably fraternized with French.

Kilometer posts of wood instead of stone.... The dear French language in the mouths of people. Breasting hills covered with woods, instead of fallow plains, intersected with level roads bordered with eternal poplar-trees.

With the joy and relief of the return, Juliette's heavy heart grew lighter. Her muscles relaxed. She could unclench her hands again. For the horror she had felt at the contiguity of the German officers and the loathing their familiar address had inspired in her had been well-nigh unbearable, though she understood their language but imperfectly. And this strange woman, her self-chosen protectress, who greedily fed on an admiration so coarse, Who was she? What was she? The poor girl shuddered as she wondered. Of women like Adelaide she had no experience, and yet she could not silence the voice of her doubt.

When Madame good-humoredly bade her unlock traveling bags, unstrap baskets and serve both with the food and drink she had lavishly provided, Juliette, declining all offers of refreshment, waited upon her, in silence so frozen that the patience of her protectress was severely taxed.

Unaided, Madame emptied a pint bottle of champagne, a fluid which temporarily elevates the spirits, and consumed the greater part of a cold pâté, with pastry and fruit, winding up the repast with a Turkish cigarette and a thimbleful of cognac from the silver flask in her traveling-bag.

"How dull you are--how cold, you tiny creature!" she grumbled. "Is it blood that runs in your veins, or melted snow? From whom do you inherit this torpid nature--without vivacity, warmth, or gaiety? Your father was not lacking in fire and passion.... Your mother----" Her long eyes laughed wickedly. "A feminine volcano, shall we say?"

A shock went through the girl. She visibly quailed and shuddered. Through the rumbling of the fiacre, she heard herself speaking in a voice she hardly recognized:

"My mother.... Did you know my mother? And--knowing her--dare you speak of her to me?..."

"Dare!..." Adelaide threw back her handsome head in a gale of laughter, curling back her crimson lips, lavishly displaying her splendid teeth. "I dare do many things," she said, still laughing. "Conventionality ... timidity ... these are not characteristics distinctive of me! Nor were they ever, to do myself justice.... Why are we stopping at this miserable place?"

Juliette, rendered dumb by growing fear of her companion, did not answer. The carriage drew up at a crossroads where a bridge arched the Givonne. They were upon the fringes of the village, near a country inn and posting-house. The driver had an ancient understanding with the proprietor of this hostelry that his beasts should break down here.

He now got down from his perch. Adelaide lowered the window. The man explained by the aid of signs that the horses were quite exhausted and they were yet three miles from Sedan. The proprietor of the inn assisted at the colloquy, extending the distance by another mile--hinting at possible dangers after nightfall. He could supply an excellent supper, a comfortable double bedroom--coffee at the peep of day, a vehicle and horses to take Madame and Mademoiselle to Sedan, or wherever they chose....

Finally the driver was paid enough to satisfy even his cupidity. Madame's luggage was taken upstairs, the ladies mounted to their room.

It was a low-ceiled, dampish apartment containing two bedsteads of uncomfortable aspect, with flock beds and dusty chintz draperies. Candles were lighted, put on the chimney-piece.... A fire of damp billets was set smoking by the efforts of the chambermaid, who was not disinclined to talk. French troops were encamped near. Let the ladies look from the window. Those lines of red and yellow lights glaring through a rising fog marked the sites of the soldiers' watch-fires. There were officers down below drinking wine and playing cards in the salle à manger. Also soldiers were drinking cider in the yard. It made one feel more safe, the presence of so many warriors. Indeed, Sedan was full of them, and all the country round about.... At Metz also, even more, with guns enough to kill all the Prussians in existence. The chambermaid felt confident that they would soon be driven out of France.

Still talking, she supplied hot water, and laid a little supper-table, the ladies preferring not to descend. A smoked omelette with herbs, some stewed pears, and a seed-cake furnished the supper, with a decanter of thin red wine.

Adelaide nibbled and sipped discontentedly. Juliette, being famished, made a meal. The billets refusing warmth Madame unrobed her sumptuous person, arrayed herself in lace and lawn, enlisting the services of her charge as lady's maid, and gracefully betook herself to bed. There she leaned on her white elbow, chatting while Juliette made her own preparations for the down-lying.... Her tigerish mood was past. She was amiable--almost affectionate.... She even praised the girlish charms reluctantly unveiled in the process of undressing; remarking:

"After all, you only want style and more tournure to do execution among the men. Some of them actually prefer coldness. They say it gives the illusion of innocence. Have you locked the door? Yes! Then double-lock and drag a trunk before it, and shut the window and slide the bolt.... Pull down the blind and draw the curtain.... One cannot be too careful in places like these!..."

"But we shall be suffocated!" Juliette cried in consternation, forgetting her deadly fear of Adelaide in her craving for fresh air. And then in the ghastly face the other turned upon her, she saw the unmistakable stamp of Fear.

"What have I said?... What has frightened you? Are you ill? Pray tell me!" she begged.

But Adelaide waved her off, biting her pale lips to bring the blood back to them, saying harshly: "It is nothing! A spasm. I have suffered from them of late.... Do not stare at me as though I were hideous. Give me my reticule.... There! on the toilette-table. How clumsy you tiny things can be!..."

Trembling, Juliette handed her the gold-mounted bauble. She took a little phial from it and a measuring-glass.

"Now place one of those candles on the night-stand, beside me. One will not do--give me both!..."

There was laudanum in the little crystal phial. When Adelaide had measured and swallowed her dose she breathed more easily, stared less fixedly, and those disfiguring reddish-purple streaks of Straz's handiwork showed less vividly against the creamy skin. Her suffused eyes regained clearness. She lay back among her pillows and declared herself better ... laughed at the terror still visible in Juliette's face....

"Now give me the little pistol and the pearl-handled dagger out of the inner compartment in my traveling-bag.... The large, deep pocket that fastens with a snap. What! you would rather not!... You do not like to handle them.... Fi donc, Mademoiselle! A soldier's daughter--and guilty of such cowardice!..."

Juliette winced at the thrust. It was her turn to bite her lips. She steadied them and mastered her voice sufficiently to say:

"I dislike to touch such weapons, because I have never learned to use them. And I will ask you, Madame, not to speak jestingly of my father to me!"

"Give me the pistol and stiletto, then!" stipulated her tormentress.

In silence Juliette took one of the candles, and set it near the traveling-bag upon the table near the supper-tray which the chambermaid had neglected to remove. She dived into the deep pocket as directed, and drew out a double-barreled pistol, mounted in ebony and silver, and the dagger, a costly toy of Indian workmanship. Something else fell upon the floor with a faint tinkle. It was a miniature set with pearls, that had rolled under the table. She laid the pistol and dagger there, took the candlestick and stooped to pick the miniature up. The portrait within the oval of pearls and gold was that of a girl-child of some five years. In the pictured face that smiled up at her with eyes as deeply blue as the spring skies of Italy, Juliette with a thrill and shock indescribable, recognized herself....

"It was the August of 1856. Thou hadst five years, and thy curls were as soft and yellow as chicken-down.... Thy mother used to say: 'Juliette will never be black like me!'"

The beloved voice was in her ears, with the very throb of his aching heart in it. De Bayard's daughter knelt so long upon the floor, motionless, staring at the horror, that Adelaide accused her jestingly of having fallen asleep.

"Get up! Wake! Give me my pistol and the dagger. I call them my babies--they sleep under my pillow ever since--never mind!... Ah! You have blown out the candle.... Light it at this one!--or perhaps you will have light enough without it?... Ugh! how cold your hand is, you chilly little frog!"

Juliette had blown out the candle so that she might unseen return the portrait to the dressing-bag. Had Straz's Sultana not been heavy with laudanum, she would have perceived this.

Now she yawned, stretched, smiled, declared herself actually sleepy, in spite of a mattress apparently stuffed with potatoes and stones....

Juliette was kneeling by the other bedside, a slender, rigid little figure in a white night-robe, striving to collect her whirling thoughts sufficiently to say her prayers. When she rose up, Adelaide asked her drowsily:

"Do you pray always?... And what do you pray for? And for whom, tell me, you secret little thing!"

The low answer came:

"I pray for the living, Madame, and for the departed.... For my father and--others who are dear to me; for myself and for my grandmother's soul!"

"For your mother?" Adelaide queried curiously.

"I pray that my mother may repent and be forgiven!"

"Ah-h!" Adelaide's inflection was sleepily scornful. "So you think her a terrible sinner, eh, Mademoiselle?"

The white-robed figure palpably shuddered, yet the answer came unfalteringly:

"It is not for me to judge--you, Madame!"

The clean riposte pierced the consciousness that had been dulled by the opiate. There was a dreadful silence, during which the girl could hear her own heart drumming, and through the noise it made, the hiss of her mother's sharply intaken and expelled breath. Then Adelaide shrugged, saying in a tone of drowsy irony:

"That is the most sensible utterance I have yet heard from you, ma mignonne. Well--the discovery was inevitable! Now, with your leave, I am going to sleep!..."

And she did, while the girl sat huddled among her scanty bedclothes, clasping her knees and praying for day. Torn between unconquerable aversion toward this bold, audacious, worldly woman, and the old yearning toward the beautiful lost mother, enshrined as a demi-goddess in a young child's recollection, you may imagine Juliette's mental and physical plight.

That one should shudder at the touch of her who stood in so sacred a relation was inconceivable.... That one should welcome it was inconceivable also. Dim conjectures as to her mother's past, as to her present mode of life, were evolved from the depths of the daughter's Convent-bred ignorance.... Would those German officers have looked so boldly, conversed so coarsely and familiarly, if they had not had reason to believe such approaches welcome, even agreeable?... The lives of Phryne, Thaïs and Aspasia were missing from the pages of Juliette's School Dictionary of Classical Biography. Yet when Cora Pearl had flashed past her in the Bois, or upon the Champs Élysées, driving four mouse-colored ponies in silver harness--wielding a jeweled parasol driving-whip--she had instinctively averted her gaze from the face of the courtesan.

Was Juliette's mother a woman like that woman? And why, within a few hours from their chance, accidental meeting, had she inveigled her daughter into a snare?... For that some sinister purpose had prompted the proceeding began to be clear to the poor young girl.

Love.... Oh, Heaven! was the look in those hard eyes born of the divine tenderness that a mother feels for her child? Was it not hatred that glittered from them? Was it not revenge that had concocted the plot?

The marriage with M. Charles Tessier, so keenly desired by the Colonel, had been quashed by his wife's kite-like swoop upon the bride. Was that story of de Bayard's having been made prisoner by Prussians true or invented? If false, whither were they now bound?... "Oh, help, Mother of Mercy, Mary most pitiful! Pray for me that light may be given me!--teach me what I ought to do!..."

Growing calmer the reflection occurred to Juliette that this mother so strangely encountered could not be all untender toward her daughter, or the pearl-set miniature would not have been kept.... This brought tears to her aching eyes, and some relief to her apprehensions. She determined, remembering that token of lingering kindness, that she would yield duty and obedience to her mother now. Until she found her all untrustworthy, she would trust her.... She had invented freely, in setting her springes--and yet not altogether lied....

Sleep did not come to Mademoiselle de Bayard that night, or for many nights after. She lay staring at the curtains that met across the blinded window, until the dawn edged them with a line of glimmering gray. As the streak encroached, she rose noiselessly, and silently as the dawn itself approached her mother's bed.

Adelaide lay upon her back with her head thrown back amid its wealth of rich black tresses, her arms tossed out and upward, the hands clenched, one knee a little raised. The unfastened robe of lawn disclosed the creamy beauty of her throat and the swelling contours of her magnificent bosom. The sight sent an exquisite pang to the heart of her sorrowful child. Oh, God! if beauty so divine had been but chaste, what pride, what happiness to call this woman mother! To lay one's head upon that breast and weep all griefs out there!...

The sleeper stirred beneath the wistful gaze of her daughter. Violet shadows were round her sealed eyelids and about her nostrils and mouth. She moaned a little and murmured brokenly:

"Nicolas ... Monseigneur ... insult ... never pardon!... 'Only a woman of fashion would be capable of such infamy....' Ah, mon Dieu!..."

She cried out, and her eyes opened, staring about wildly. She asked suspiciously as they fell on Juliette:

"Have I been talking?... What was I saying?"

Juliette answered simply and literally:

"That only a woman of fashion would be capable of such infamy."

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LIII

They broke their fast on rolls and coffee, dressed and demanded, with the bill, the promised carriage. This was not so quickly forthcoming as the landlord of the Coup d'Épée had prophesied. Indeed, the debilitated conveyance of the wagonette type, drawn by one promoted cart-horse, could only be had by grace of the traveler by whom it had been previously engaged. He proved, when Adelaide swept her charge downstairs, to be a Monsieur Anglais, traveling for pleasure. A middle-sized, clean-shaven, inconspicuous, elderly man, in an ill-fitting suit of drab-color. He sported a sealskin vest in spite of the oppressive heat of the weather, and spoke the French of the conversation-manual with the accent it inculcates. His baldish grizzled head was covered with a straw hat bound with a preposterous light-blue ribbon. His luggage consisted of a brown calfskin bag, a portable easel, sketching-block and color-box, and a violin-case, of which articles he took the most excessive care. Nothing could well be more respectable, or appear more harmless. Juliette breathed more freely at the sight of the elderly drab-clothed man.

He professed himself happy to accommodate the ladies with a share in the wagonette as far as Bazeilles, where he meant to take train for Verdun. Interpreting for Adelaide, who possessed no English, Juliette learned that their own destination was not Metz, but Châlons.

That drive to Bazeilles in the freshness of the morning would have been delightful under other circumstances. The night-mists yet hung white as milk over the valleys, while the breasting rises crowned with woodlands were golden in the sun. Tents of French brigades snowed over the countryside. Bugles and trumpets sometimes drowned the rushing of the Givonne, beside whose stream their road conducted them. The stubbles were full of grain-devouring wood-pigeons, too heavy even to rise and take wing when peasant-lads threw stones. The drab Englishman praised the view in the set terms of the manual, until discovering that Mademoiselle had command of the tongue of Albion, he reverted to that language with evident relief.

"For I won't deny it comes easier, though I manage to get on with the other when necessary. And since I left England--seven months ago--my poor health requiring a holiday from business--it has been necessary most of the time."

"Ask the hideous animal in the ugly clothes whether he has seen a newspaper this morning," instructed Madame. "And find out if he knows anything of the movements of the Emperor. Those miserables at the inn were absolutely ignorant, or else they would not tell!"

The drab English traveler had reason to know something of his Imperial Majesty, having recently encountered him with his suite at the village of Gravelotte, eight miles from Metz. He explained in a rambling manner, and with many divagations, that he himself had been surprised by the intrusion of War at the outset of a sketching-tour in the northwest of France, which was to have realized the ambition of his life.

"Painting from Nature and playing on the violin.... Those are what I may call my weaknesses," he told the ladies by-and-by.

He was moist-eyed and red-nosed and shaky-handed, which must have interfered with his brush-work and bowing. An odor of strong waters exhaled from his person and clothes. You, had you been there, could have imagined him making an inventory, serving a summons, or, mounted on a Holborn auctioneer's rostrum--knocking down second-hand works of inferior Art to imaginary bidders, and vaunting the qualities of sticky-toned violins. Save for his garrulity, he was inoffensive; though his open conviction that his fellow-travelers were mother and daughter caused Juliette infinite anguish and disquiet of mind.

"With regard to His Majesty the French Emperor, I was brought into contact with him unexpectedly," said the drab man. "You can picture me, young lady, in the enjoyment of my well-earned holiday, strolling, as one may say, from village to village, enjoying the fresh air and the scenery, such a change after five-and-twenty years of Camberwell, the Courts of Law, and Furnival's Inn."

Adelaide complained:

"He bores me horribly, this red-nosed imbecile! Cannot he answer the question? What is he saying now?"

The drab man prattled on:

"For from the cradle, as one might say, I have been the vassal and slave of Business, having been sent by my father to a Mercantile and Legal Training College at Bromersham when only seven years old. At fifteen I was office-boy and under-clerk in the old gentleman's office. Believed in beginning at the bottom of the ladder, you see! At eighteen, articled--again to the old gentleman! He being a solicitor and attorney with a good old-fashioned family practice, and naturally being desirous to see his son a full-blown partner in the Firm!..."

He sighed and shook his head sentimentally.

"No use to tell the old gentleman I had been born with other ambitions. That Art had a fascination, and the voice of Music called.... I used up reams of office wove-note in making pen-and-ink designs for illustrations to the books I'd read on the sly, and the plays I'd seen on the quiet.... I'd render popular airs on the mouth-organ to the admiration of all the other clerks. 'Now, Mr. William, let's have a Musical Selection!' they'd say whenever the old gentleman popped out.... I saved up my money to pay for a course of tuition in Drawing from the Round and Life Model at a Night School of Art in Soho. But I never got time. The old gentleman must have been more knowing than I suspected, for he always managed to keep my nose to the grindstone. Will you believe that I bought this box, and this easel, and the violin twenty years ago--and never got a chance to use 'em, until now? To such a degree was my liberty hectored over, and the talents that might have made me the center of a circle of admirers, blighted by the Senior Partner and Head of the Firm...."

Adelaide, growing more restive, interrupted:

"Does this fatuous person who talks so greatly afford any information, or does he not?"

"--Yet I could show you a sketch of the Roman Aqueduct at Ars that would surprise you," went on the drab man, addressing Juliette, "regarded as emanating from the pencil of a simple amatoor. Also I could touch off a French chansong on the violin in a style equally creditable and gratifying--and justifying my retirement from Business in the interests of Music and Art. But----"

He took out a plaid silk handkerchief and wiped his moist eyes with it, and wagged the grizzled head that wore the absurd blue-ribboned straw hat in a maudlin, despondent way.

"But just as I'd settled to the roving life, tramping from inn to inn and finding 'em comfortable, the country cooking tasty, and the country vintages nice--War breaks out and spoils everything! Another week, and I should have bought a Bit of Ground!"

He mopped his eyes and snuffled a little, and put away the handkerchief.

"It was going cheap--the Chatto and farm and wine-plant and vineyards. I had a good look at the title-deeds--everything was in order there, even to a professional eye.... All I had to do was to put down the money. I'd have painted and fiddled, made wine and drunk it--sold what I didn't drink, and branded the vintages: 'Château Musty, Dry, Sparkling ... Château Musty, Special Still.' ... Château Musty, sweet, preferred by ladies.... Stop, though! It wouldn't have been that name! My name is Furnival! Excuse me, Mam'selle, but I think your lady-mother is making some remark to you. At least she impresses me with that idea."

"Madame is greatly desirous of intelligence with respect to the Emperor," Juliette explained. The talkative traveler looked aggrieved:

"Pray tell the lady I am coming to him presently. After the War broke out--Lord! what a hurrying and scurrying of soldiers.... Bugles blowing your head off at four o'clock in the morning--all the wagons taken to carry baggage--all the farm-horses whipped off to drag cannon ... no more sensible business done anywhere!... And when the shooting began, it was a scandal! Positively perilous to visitors! Why, I've been absolutely in danger of my life!..."

Adelaide's foot tapped impatiently on the floor of the wagonette. Her fine eyes shot forth indignant sparks. She bit her crimson lips. The drab Englishman regarded her mildly, commenting:

"If I wasn't accustomed by this time to French ways and manners, I should take it that your mamma had a temper of her own. But it's the national method of over-working the features.... Not that your Emperor is given to too much expression. Heavy, he struck me as, and puffily low-spirited! And even a worse sleeper than myself, if you ask me! For I spent the night in a room over His Majesty's, the night he stopped in the inn at Gravelotte, and didn't shut my eyes for an instant with his groanings and his moanings and his tramp ings to and fro...."

He wagged his head, and pursued with solemnity:

"In the morning I peeped out of the window and saw him drive off. All sorts of French Nobs bowing and scraping.... Orders and Stars and shiny carriages, and silver-mounted harness on prancing bays.... Yet if he had asked me, I wouldn't have changed places. Thinks I, 'How much better to be Me, plain William Furnival, an honest English Commoner, than an Emperor whose crime-stained conscience keeps him broad awake o' nights!'"

Said Juliette, her eyes blue fire, two angry roses in her usually pale cheeks:

"But you, Monsieur--who also sleep badly--is that because you have crime upon your soul?"

"What have you said to this creature that has frightened him?" Adelaide demanded, as the drab traveler's jaw dropped, and his red nose glowed brilliantly in a visage of dingy-white.

Juliette translated. Said Madame, regarding the perturbed Mr. Furnival, with a glance of superb indifference:

"He is a runaway husband of some Englishwoman who keeps a pension. Or the absconding clerk of a London notary."

Whatever he may or may not have been, he fell silent after the little passage here recorded. At Bazeilles, where the driver was paid, and the wagonette dismissed, though he entered the same train of vilely dirty third-class carriages and goods-trucks, he traveled in a compartment remote from that selected by his companions of the drive.

At Verdun they learned that the railway bridge below Metz had been blown up by M. de Bazaine's Engineers, the line beyond being in Prussian hands.... And at this point the drab gentleman got out, hugging his violin-case, bag, and artist's fit-out. Juliette saw him swallowed up in a roaring crowd of mobilists from the Ardennes, who rushed upon and instantly crammed solid every corner of the train.

A good-looking officer, entering with the deluge, apologized to the ladies in a well-bred, easy way:

"It is inconvenient, Mesdames, but at the same time necessary.... I take these little ones to Châlons to be incorporated in the New Army of MacMahon.... They are rough, as you perceive, and very few are yet in uniform. But blue cloth and red cloth are less important than chassepots, and they have them and can use them--these little ones of mine! And when they receive orders to march north and give a helping hand to M. de Bazaine--I prophesy that, boots or no boots, they will keep up with the best!"

Adelaide smiled witchingly on the speaker, plied the archery of her fine eyes, evoking admiring glances from the officer and his uncouth, half-clad, half-trained mobilists. She said she had no doubt of the courage of these sons of Western France. She had heard, she added, that the Emperor was at Châlons, but that H.I.M. intended to resort to Paris, having surrendered to another the bâton of supreme command.

"'To Paris'!" The officer shrugged. "Alas! at such a crisis in the affairs of the nation, Paris would be the last shelter for the French Emperor. It is no longer a secret that the Emperor has already left Châlons with the Grand Headquarters Staff and the First Corps of the Army of MacMahon.... Rheims is the destination--that intelligence is also public property...."

"And the Prince?" Adelaide asked eagerly.

"Monseigneur the Prince Imperial left for Rheims with the Emperor, but will be sent on from there to Rethel, with his carriages, and an escort of Imperial Body Guards under Colonel Watrin. His three aides-de-camp, Colonel Lamey, Colonel Comte Clary, and Commandant Duperré of the battleship Le Taureau, attend him. Comte d'Aure is equerry now instead of old Bachon!... Pardon, Madame?... You descend here...? But I thought you were traveling to Châlons!... Permit me to open the carriage door!"

And the prattling officer, who had promised himself a charming vis-à-vis upon the journey, must needs leap out upon the platform, arrest the guard's arm in the act of signaling the start.... Adelaide was handed down.... Juliette followed with an avalanche of Madame's traveling bags and parcels ... a discontented porter was called upon to rescue her trunks and portmanteaux from the van....

The signal fell, the train steamed out of the station. Juliette, white and fagged, sitting on an up-piled luggage truck, was asked by Adelaide:

"Where do you think we are going now, Mademoiselle?"

Came the weary answer:

"I do not know, Madame.... First, it was to Metz, and then to Châlons. Now, it may be to Rheims, as the Emperor is there."

Adelaide returned tormentingly:

"But we are not going to Rheims."

A thrill passed through Juliette.

"My father is not a prisoner, then?"

"My faith!" said Adelaide, shrugging with ostentatious indifference. "He is as he was yesterday. But all the same, my little one, we do not go to Rheims, but to Rethel.... Tell me--you have brought with you a walking-costume that is tolerable? Something more becoming than this lugubrious garment you have on!"

Juliette replied in the negative. Adelaide's look was coldly scornful as she scrutinized the little figure before her. Could this really be her daughter, this pale, peaked, elfish thing?...

What sloping shoulders, what tragic, haunted eyes, what a long upper lip, what lack of vivacity and elegance.... Her grandmother--that well-loathed woman, lived again in de Bayard's child.

Monseigneur the Prince Imperial must have curious taste in feminine beauty to have been smitten with this stiff little white-faced mannequin. Whom de Bayard worshiped ... whom even Straz had admired.... What were his words ... "A little Queen of Diamonds, fresh as a rosebud!" Grand Dieu!... how comical! "A rare jewel.... A chic type.... A pocket edition of Psyche, before that little affair with Cupid."

Well, Cupid waited at Rethel.... Her red lips writhed with the jeering laughter she stifled. Two devils of mockery looked through the windows of her eyes. And with the swift understanding of this stranger that came of their close, intimate relationship, Juliette encountering that look, said mentally:

"She hates me! My mother hates me! For that reason she sought me out and told me that false tale.... Because of that she lured me away with her from Brussels! Because of that she has planned to do something.... Oh, my father, if only you knew!..."

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LIV

The Hope of a tottering and crumbling Empire was installed at the Prefecture of Rethel, a picturesque, old-world river-town of many bridges, and houses with quaint carved gables, slanting floors, and low ceilings crossed by heavy beams.

He had arrived late on the previous evening. There had been no flags, no bands, no popular ovation, no delirium of enthusiasm in greeting the Imperial heir. Press organs were now telling incredulous Parisians that in consideration of the Prince's weariness the people had foregone their privilege of welcome. In honest truth, the unlucky townsfolk were too sad and sick-hearted to cheer.

A great battle was impending in the neighborhood of Metz. The First and Second Armies of United Germany had crossed the Moselle, wheeled right-about-face, and were closing in on Bazaine, who had failed in his attempt to retire upon Châlons by the Verdun Road. The Prussian Crown Prince had come out of the Vosges, and was marching North instead of moving upon Châlons. If his vanguard clashed with MacMahon's patched-up Army there would be trouble.... Everyone expected trouble, the soil of France had been sown so thickly with the bad seed from which great national disasters spring, even before it had been plowed by German shells.... The coming tragedy chilled and numbed as the iceberg chills the senses of the passenger in the Atlantic liner's warm deck-cabin, long before the keel grates, and the white fog lifts, and shows the towering Death on which the doomed vessel is being hurled.

The deep dejection of the officers around the Heir Imperial could not be covered by any well-meant attempts at disguise. The rumors that came through the fog into which Bazaine had vanished were horribly disquieting. They waited upon thorns, for a telegram from the Emperor, conveying intelligence on which they might rely.

There was something in the situation of the lonely, proud young creature they surrounded that made the heart bleed as you looked at him. So helpless and yet so representative of unfettered Power, so ignorant in the ways of the world, and yet so conversant with its outward forms and ceremonies, so palpably the last frail link upon a chain that was being hacked through by the Prussian sword.

He had grown older and thinner since the days of July, and his fresh, fine color had faded to paleness. There was a frown upon the open forehead now, the gay, confident regard had changed to sullenness. The blue eyes were less lustrous. The silky chestnut hair was rumpled and duller. Care had overshadowed the boyish head with her heavy sable wing.

The arrival of the previous night had been sudden and unexpected, the startled authorities had been rarely put about to find fitting accommodation for their Emperor's son. This morning Monseigneur had been hurried out of his bed at the Prefecture to receive the apologies of the Prefect, an Imperialistic vine-grower, who had been absent in the interests of his affairs.

"Your Imperial Highness will be aware that this is a critical month with owners of vineyards. The vines have borne well and the grapes are ripening magnificently. Next month the champagne-making ought to be in full progress. But the lack of hands terribly hampers us.... Women cannot replace the men who are skilled in the various processes. And who knows----"

The Prefect broke off, for the Sub-Prefect had nudged him openly. Even if the tide of War should turn, and France be freed from her invaders, who knew whether any of those grape-pickers and sorters and pressers, Reservists and volunteers and conscripts who had been called out to carry the chassepot against the Prussians, would ever return to their countryside again? Who knew whether they would not be thrown as ripe grapes into Death's huge wine-press? Perhaps their red blood was foaming in the vat even now.

Who knew whether those rich, prosperous vineyards on the Aisne would not be trampled into sticky mashiness under the ruthless feet of Prussian Army Corps? If the rumors were correct, an advance upon Paris might take place at any moment. True, MacMahon's Army was said to be covering the road to the capital.

But MacMahon had been already beaten terribly.... Recollecting it, the Prefect shuddered in his well-polished shoes.

But he said his say and shook the young hand graciously offered him, and got out of his own wife's drawing-room as awkwardly as though he had been one of his own clerks. While the Sub-Prefect, a sharp-visaged little man, who combined the office of public notary with the trade of wool-stapler, trotted after him, very much at his ease.

"How you sweat! Wipe your head and your neck too," counseled the notary. "Otherwise your cravat will be a perfect wisp and Madame will certainly take you to task!"

"You have such sangfroid, my good M. Schlitte. I envy you; I do, positively!" stuttered the Prefect, puffing and blowing and mopping. "Royalty invariably dazzles me.... I tremble ... I blunder.... In a word, I make a fool of myself! At this moment I am tortured by the weight of my responsibilities.... True--His Highness is well guarded--true, the Army of Châlons is somewhere or other in the neighborhood!... But the daring of these Prussian horsemen ... the danger of a surprise!..."

"A surprise.... Nonsense, my dear sir. The thing is impossible!"

And M. Schlitte, who was said upon the strength of his queer French accent to be a native of Strasbourg, soothed the Prefect, and grinned like a rat-trap as he betook himself home. Inhabiting a riverside villa in the neighborhood, from which residence--we may suppose for the better conduct of his extensive business--a private telegraphic installation connected him with Rheims, Paris, Brussels, Luxembourg--and, when necessary, Berlin--it would have been possible to have made arrangements for that very contingency. His suggestions were not adopted at the Prussian Headquarters, but his zeal was approved in the right place. He became Prefect of Rethel a little later, when Berlin was settled at Versailles.

He stopped now, on his way back to his villa, to send the town-band round to the Place of the Prefecture and to bribe some loafers with small silver to mix with the crowd and cheer for the Emperor and the Prince. Consequently, a drum, trombone, cornet, and ophicleide shortly made their appearance before the Imperial lodgings.... La Reine Hortense and Partant Pour La Syrie entertained Monseigneur while he breakfasted. Since then he had thrice been summoned out upon the balcony to acknowledge the acclamations of the loyal populace of Rethel.

It was pouring rain, and the knots of spies, loafers, and genuine enthusiasts were sheltered by umbrellas. The very fowls that pecked between the cobbles had a listless and draggled air. The boy shivered as he turned from the dismal outdoor prospect to contemplate the Empire hangings, ormolu girandoles, and obsolete, scroll-backed chairs and claw-foot tables, gracing the Prefect's wife's reception-room. He told himself that it was horrible, even when one waited for the news of certain victory, to be shut up in a beastly hole like this.

He nearly jumped for joy when the name of M. de Straz was brought him by his equerry. He remembered the Roumanian agent, who had previously been presented to him.

"Pray bring him quickly, M. le Comte," he said eagerly to M. d'Aure, who had replaced old M. Bachon. "It is possible that he may bring a message from the Emperor."

He colored, and his eyes regained a little of their old brightness. The green-and-gold equerry, who loved him, as did every member of his household, was glad to see him, interested, for more reasons than one.

Straz, known to be a secret agent of the Emperor, and hailing from Rheims, where his employer was now--Straz might well amuse the Prince while his protectors waited for an Imperial telegram. Meanwhile, the bodyguard about the Prefecture was unostentatiously doubled, the carriages and the baggage were secretly held in readiness for a move.

You can imagine Straz, with his profile and beard of a courtier of old Nineveh, bowing over the boyish hand, and rolling his jet-black, glittering eyes. He had looked better in his Astrachan-trimmed traveling jacket than in the tight-waisted, closely buttoned, black frock-coat and pearl-gray trousers of ceremony, and the inky river of black silk cravat that flowed over the expanse of white shirt-front now covering his Herculean chest.

He wore white spats, which made his short legs appear shorter. A bouquet adorned his buttonhole--pink carnation and tuberose. Its cloying fragrance hung heavily on the damp air of the Prefecture reception-room, as the boy pleasantly said:

"Good-day, M. de Straz; do you come to us from the Emperor?"

"Yes, my Prince, and no!..." Straz had long ago got rid of his cold, yet a certain thickness characterized his consonants. He shrugged his great shoulders and smiled, showing his dazzling double curves of solid human ivory. "I come from Rheims, where His Imperial Majesty is making history.... I am not charged with any message from him!"

The boy's face fell. He said, with a brave effort to conquer his disappointment: "I am impatient, Monsieur, for news of another victory. It is so long since the engagement of Saarbrück, and that was only a little one. You are an officer in the Army of Roumania, you have told me. You are aware, even better than I, that military plans take time to develop .. and that Papa has every confidence in the generalship of M. de Bazaine.... If I were five or six years older, I should be admitted to the Councils of the Imperial État Major.... I should understand the reasons for these changes which puzzle me.... But one thing I should like to ask..." He flushed and glanced round nervously. "They do not believe in Paris or London that we are being ... beaten?... I beg of you to answer me candidly!"

Straz drew himself up dramatically, expanding his huge chest, and curling his parted mustache. His fierce black eyes, staring from their great curved arches, glittered like balls of polished jet....

"They do not, my Prince! They wait for the Star of the Bonapartes to rise resplendent from a sea of gore shed from Prussian veins.... They wait, as the world waits, for the Empire to emerge more glorious than ever from this conflict, which will restore to her forever her lost Provinces of the Rhine. It may be that the Coronation of Napoleon IV. will be solemnized in the Cathedral of Cologne.... Aha, my Prince, have I won a smile at last?"

He looked, despite the frock-coat, more than ever like some ancient warrior of Assyria, marching in a carved and painted procession along the walls of some unearthed palace of Nineveh or Babylon. And so admirable an actor was he that the sick heart of the boy now warmed at his simulated fire, and gladdened at his deceptive words of hope.

"I had pictured my Imperial Prince," he went on, "in brighter and less gloomy surroundings, with sympathetic and delightful companions to alleviate his exile from home."

He had touched the wrong chord. The slender, well-made figure was drawn up proudly. The delicate brows frowned, the lips quivered as the boy said:

"Monsieur, it is not 'exile' when an officer is ordered on Active Service.... And I am with the French Army, whose uniform I wear. For the moment the Emperor, my commanding officer, has ordered me to remain here.... I did wrong to grumble--I shall do so no more!"

Straz grinned and bowed to cover his momentary confusion. Why had he used the indigestible word? He touched his buttonhole bouquet and said with a treacly inflection:

"There are no violets--it is not the proper season.... Does Monseigneur remember when the purple blooms reached him regularly at intervals, one timid scrap of paper hiding among the slender stems? ... And would he, did he know how the sender languished for news of him--entrust me with one penciled message of kindness that might restore the rose to a fading cheek?"

The clear-eyed, fresh face of the boy he harangued underwent several changes during this windy apostrophe. For one brief instant it flushed and brightened eagerly, then it frowned with perplexity, then it twitched with the evident desire to laugh.

He said, controlling his amusement with his grace of good-breeding:

"Monsieur, if it was a lady who sent me those violets, pray tell her that she was very good to do so, and that I thank her very much. And since she asks for a message--perhaps this will do as well?"

He turned to the writing-table, where some sheets, covered with clever pen-and-ink caricatures, lay on the blotter, and took up a rough little outline drawing of a landscape, marked with lines of dots and written over with notes. He said ingenuously, offering this to the Roumanian:

"See, Monsieur, this is a mere sketch of the affair at Saarbrück. I did it to send my tutor at Paris, but M. Filon shall have another one.... If the lady has sons of my age, no doubt they will be able to draw far better. Nevertheless, here it is!"

Under the date of August 2nd, he had signed it, with a touch of boyish vanity:

"_Under fire for the first time. "Your affectionate "Louis Napoleon._"

"What genius!--what a gift! How gracious an act of kindness on the part of your Imperial Highness!"

Straz grabbed the little scrawl eagerly, pressed his moist scarlet lips to it with theatrical devotion--made a tremendous flourish of putting it away in a pocketbook, and bestowing this receptacle near the region of his heart.

"Though the lady has no sons--she is not even yet married," he hinted. "Dare I confide a secret to Monseigneur?--she is a young and beautiful girl!"

Monseigneur had been promising himself to caricature Straz at the next opportunity, not forgetting to make the most of his profile, hair, and beard. Young and beautiful girls were no novelties to Louis Napoleon, accustomed to do the honors of Versailles and Saint Cloud to the muslin-clad daughters of the sparkling coquettes who frequented the Imperial Circle. He began, struggling with the boredom that began to oppress him:

"If the young girl is your fiancée, Monsieur, or your daughter----"

The speaker broke off at the sound of hoofs and wheels on the cobblestones of the Place, the bump of a carriage-step let down, hitting the curb before the Prefecture.... Someone had arrived with a message from the Emperor; or perhaps it was only the Prefect's wife returning from an airing.... Straz would have been other than himself had he failed to seize the opportunity.

"Monseigneur, Mademoiselle de Bayard is not affianced. She has hitherto declined all alliances proposed as advantageous--it is said her affections are secretly engaged!..."

His smirk revolted even while it fascinated. He said, rolling his glistening black eyes about the apartment--shrugging his great shoulders, laying a thick white squat-nailed finger mysteriously against his carmine lips:

"Engaged since a little rencontre that took place in the month of January.... There were disturbances in Paris--which the troops had been called out to quell. Riding with M. de Frossard in the Avenues of the Champs Élysées, your Highness passed close by a young girl in a cab. She cried out, 'Vive le Prince Impérial!' ... She threw a knot of violets, which struck your horse on the shoulder.... You had the flowers in your hand, Monseigneur, when you rode away."

"Ah, now I remember!" The boy's blush became him. "Or I should say I have not forgotten. And where is she now, Monsieur?"

"Where is Mademoiselle de Bayard? Your Imperial Highness would like to know?"

Straz, who had thrilled with a sportsman's joy at the curtsey of the float betokening a nibble, would have given his soul to know himself.... Now, as he delayed, with the air of one who momentarily holds back something eagerly waited for, the equerry knocked and entered, approached and whispered to the Prince.

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LV

"But surely, M. le Comte, it would please me to receive these two ladies. M. de Straz has just been speaking of Mademoiselle de Bayard."

And he dismissed Straz, who for once had been stricken speechless; giving his hand to him and saying: "I am very much obliged by your visit, Monsieur!"

The equerry retired, shepherding the unstrung Roumanian. The Prince waited, looking at the door.

He heard footsteps descending the stairs, a slight bustle in the hall, or so it seemed to him. Once a raised voice cried out something, drowned in the buzzing of the crowd that now gorged the Place of the Prefecture.

It still rained. The brass helmets of the Fire-Brigade and the black shakos of the local police strung out along the edge of the pavement, showed as fringing a solid mass of dripping umbrellas; there were clumps of more privileged umbrellas in the middle of the Place, where a hackney-carriage now stood, doubtless the vehicle that a moment previously had stopped before the door. The Cent Gardes had their undress cocked-hats on; their blue-caped mantles, pulled out in cavalry fashion over the hindquarters of their tall brown horses, shed off the merciless downpour like penthouse roofs....

Brr! It was chilly. Why did not Mademoiselle come? Such delay was rather a breach of etiquette.

Meanwhile, there upon the blotter lay a sheet of paper, with an unfinished caricature upon it--masterly, considering that a mere boy had drawn it--representing M. Thiers, bald, spectacled, oracularly smiling, in the guise of a gobbling turkey-cock.

M. Thiers would keep. The Prince chose another sheet, and began his portrait of the Roumanian, humming a song, popular with the African infantry-regiments, in capital tune and time. "Gentle Turco" had been half sung through when the door opened. The crisp grizzled curls, tanned soldierly face, waxed mustache, and green-and-silver uniform of the equerry reappeared upon the threshold, ushering in a small young lady.... D'Aure said, as the boy laid down his pen, rose and came toward them:

"Monseigneur, I bring the young lady of whom I spoke to you, daughter of Colonel de Bayard, 777th Chasseurs of the Emperor's Guard. She has convinced me of her identity by showing me a portrait, and a letter from her father.... She begs me to assure you that she will not detain you longer than ten minutes. For that space of time I will return to the lady downstairs." He added at the Prince's glance of inquiry: "The lady is the wife of a French officer, and accompanied Mademoiselle de Bayard. As I went downstairs just now with M. de Straz, we encountered both ladies in the vestibule. A giddiness seized the elder, she cried out, and swooned away."

The Prince said:

"Pray give orders that the sick lady is to have every attention!"

D'Aure answered that the wife of the Prefect was with Madame even then. He saluted, and repeated with an accent of finality:

"For the space of ten minutes, Monseigneur...."

Then he bowed to Mademoiselle de Bayard, and went quickly out of the room.

The Prince began, with a touch of boyish pompousness:

"We have met before, Mademoiselle. My thanks for the violets!"

For he knew this face with cheeks so fairly rose-tinted, with eyes that shone brilliant as blue jewels from their covert of black lashes, with the softly-smiling mouth. The dull moth shone out a butterfly in the radiance of the joy that overbrimmed her. She was near her Prince Imperial, Juliette de Bayard, who was not so much loyal as Loyalty incarnate, to whom the tawdry figure of the Emperor was invested with godlike splendor, in whose esteem the Empire was France--her France....

She was attired as she had been when she left Brussels with Adelaide. Only a fichu of black and white Malines lace that she had brought in the handbag containing linen and toilet requisites, had been pinned about her narrow, sloping shoulders, and a tiny bonnet matching this was perched upon her magnificent coils of cloudy-black hair. Her deft fingers had fashioned it in a few minutes out of the long ends of the over-ample fichu. A bunch of fragrant red roses had been pinned upon her bosom by Madame. She had purchased out of her own slender resources a fringed gray silk parasol and a pair of little gray kid gloves. And in this hastily arranged toilette she looked elegant, refined, exclusive as any slender aristocrat of the Faubourg St. Germain. You would never have suspected the tumult beneath her sedate composure. Yet she thrilled in every fiber as she swept her stateliest curtsey before the slender boy in the unassuming uniform of a subaltern of infantry.

"Monseigneur is too good to remember so infinitely trifling an occurrence ... more than gracious to consent to receive me now! But that my dear father is a prisoner in the hands of the Prussians, I would not dare to intrude upon the privacy of my Prince. Oh, Monseigneur! of your pity prevail upon the Emperor to obtain the exchange of my father for some German officer of equal rank in his Army! Think, oh, pray!--think how I..."

She stopped to control herself ... felt for her handkerchief to dry the tears that were blinding her ... dropped the scrap of cambric upon the Aubusson carpet gracing the drawing-room of the Prefecture. The Prince picked the handkerchief up as Mademoiselle hastily stooped to recover it ... their heads encountered in the act. The bump was a hard one--Juliette could have sunk into the earth with confusion.... But the Prince rubbed his forehead, grinned, and called out like any other schoolboy:

"My word! that was a stunner! I do hope you're not hurt? Are you, as it happens, Mademoiselle?"

"No, no, Monseigneur! But you?..."

"I am all right! Saw lots of stars, though!"

He burst out laughing. And so infectious was the peal of merriment that for one blissful moment of forgetfulness Juliette joined in.

"To laugh does the heart good," the boy assured her. He went on: "Do not be unhappy, for I will telegraph to the Emperor. He never denies me anything I ask him.... Depend upon it, he will do everything in his power for your father, Mademoiselle!"

She looked all thanks, saying in her voice of silver:

"I shall pray with redoubled fervor for His Imperial Majesty. And for you, Monseigneur--be well assured of it! Now, with all my gratitude, I will retire if your Highness permits?"

She swept her curtsey, and would have withdrawn then had not Monseigneur called out eagerly:

"No, no! We have still eight of our ten minutes! Don't go!... I do so like the way you talk.... Mon Dieu! What would the Empress say to me if she knew that I had left a lady standing! Pray sit down here, Mademoiselle!"

He turned round the writing-chair in which he had been sitting, made her take it--perched himself upon the corner of the writing-table, a schoolboy of fifteen in spite of his uniform, pouring out his heart to a girl older than he.

"It was horrible here until you came!... I was so lonely! Everybody looks so strange, and no news comes through. It would have been better to have stayed at Metz, where there is fighting. But no! We were compelled to return to Châlons.... On our way we were nearly caught by the German cavalry. They are terribly daring ... they even ventured into our lines at Longeville.... But we got to Verdun and traveled to Châlons in a third-class carriage. Frightfully dirty, and full of things that bit.... And I washed my face in a thick glass tumbler, out of which I had drunk some wine they brought me.... Fact, I assure you!... But we soldiers don't mind hardships.... We get used to them, Mademoiselle!"

She looked up at the brightened face with the tenderness of an elder sister. He went on with increasing animation and growing confidence:

"Do you see that little black box standing there in the corner? That's my officer's kit--all the baggage we're allowed to have on Active Service. There are other boxes with other things..." He blushed. "The valets look after them.... But this I keep under my own eye. And here!... This I hold as a great treasure. Do you think I would show it to everyone?... Non, merci! ... Behold, Mademoiselle!"

He took from a pocket beneath his tunic and showed her a splinter of rusty iron wrapped in an envelope.

"Guess what this is! A bit of a real German bombshell.... It burst quite close to the Emperor and me.... I thought a lot of old iron was being shot out of a cart, there was such a racket.... This should be a keepsake for the friend one loves above all, should it not? Otherwise I would give it you, Mademoiselle!"

She said:

"Monseigneur is too generous.... I need no token by which to remember him!... Have I not the remembrance of the sympathy and condescension with which my Prince has listened to a daughter's prayer?... Now, indeed, I must take leave of Monseigneur!..."

He persisted with boyish eagerness:

"No, no! M. d'Aure will certainly return at the end of our ten minutes. And I do like you so much, Mademoiselle!... Will you write and tell me when the Emperor obtains the release of M. le Colonel? ... Will you let me hear how you liked the little sketch I gave M. de Straz for you?"

She was puzzled, and looked it:

"Monseigneur will pardon me, but the name of M. de Straz is that of a stranger.... Yet he has received from Monseigneur a message for me?..."

Louis Napoleon explained. She listened with a gravity that chilled his amusement over the message he had sent to the supposedly elderly sender of the violets.

She said, looking at him steadily with her sincere eyes:

"I sent Monseigneur no violets, with messages written or otherwise. To have done so would have been presumptuous, and lacking in delicacy.... If this M. de Straz were but here.... If Monseigneur could but describe him!..."

Monseigneur caught up the unfinished caricature:

"Look, Mademoiselle! This is he!"

It was he.... The Assyrian head, great torso, and short legs had been grotesquely exaggerated. But the ferocity, sentimentality, and sensuality mingling in the exotic temperament of the Roumanian, had been conveyed with a mastery of technique and a grasp of character astonishing, considering the artist's youth. And seeing, Juliette recognized the man they had encountered in the vestibule. Just as he had passed them, Adelaide had cried out, and sunk down helplessly in a genuine swoon.

"Ah, yes, Monseigneur, I have seen this gentleman, but a few moments ago. We encountered him at the instant of entering the house. But I do not know him--I have never before met him! Why, then, should M. de Straz speak familiarly of me?"

The boy said, with a tactfulness that was ingratiating:

"Never mind!... He was playing some stupid trick!... He shall be punished if he offends you. See! I am tearing up the ugly picture!"

"Oh, Monseigneur!"

She was too late to save the drawing. He went on, tossing away the bits:

"Meanwhile--since the sketch I meant for you has been given to this person, you shall have my shell-splinter, though at first I meant it for--Cavaignac."

He had never uttered this name, about which so many lonely day-dreams clung, in the hearing of any second person. He could hardly believe that he had done so now as he went on:

"Take my souvenir, and shut your hand over it, and promise me you will never part with it. If you will, I can tell you about Cavaignac--my friend, Mademoiselle!"

She complied with his wish, smiling at the tone of authority. She thought, looking in the beautiful frank blue eyes, that Cavaignac must be proud of his high place in this princely young heart.

"He is brave, Mademoiselle, and handsome and wonderfully clever. Once he gained the second prize for Greek translation at the Concours General. And Greek is horribly difficult. M. Edeline could never teach it me. I find the grammar so dreadfully dull! And yet Alexander the Great was a Greek general, and would have told me all about his campaigns in the Greek language.... I think I must find it hard to study because the figures of people mean more to me than letters and words!... I like better to draw caricatures of my masters than to listen to them!"

Juliette said, with something maternal in her accent:

"That is unwise, Monseigneur.... For the better we learn, the sooner we part with the teacher, do not we?"

He said, in a tone of wounded pride rather than vanity:

"I have always attended carefully to my Military Governor when he gave us lessons in scientific warfare. For a Napoleon must always be a soldier and a strategist.... Riding came easily--anybody can learn to ride well!... When I have pleased my tutors most, my reward has been--unless it was in July or August--a day with the stag-hounds at Fontainebleau, or St. Germain or Compiègne.... The Emperor has given me two magnificent Irish hunters...." He added with naïve boyish vanity: "And the uniform of our Imperial Hunt is splendid, you know.... Gold-laced cocked hat with white plumes, green coat with crimson velvet facings, white leathers and jack-boots. Last night I dreamed I was hunting with Cavaignac ... the brown forest flying by as we galloped through the frosty fern.... The sky was pale red, and a diamond star hung just under the tip of the new moon of November. We were foremost of all when the stag turned to bay at the Pools of Saint Pierre.... Then the horns sounded the hallali, the Chief Huntsman offered me the knife, and I said to him: 'M. Leemans, you will give it to my friend, M. Cavaignac!' ..."

"And then, Monseigneur?..."

He had told the dream with unexpected spirit and fire. That gallop through the wintry forest-rides had been stimulatingly real to Juliette. She had thrilled as the hard-pressed buck had leaped into the pool, and turned with antlers lowered against the ravening jaws of the pack. Now, though she shrank from the thought of the spilled blood--she wanted to hear the rest of it. She wished always to remember this story, told solely for her, by the son of her Emperor....

"Shall I tell you? The end is not as nice as the beginning or the middle...." He hesitated, frowning a little, then took up the broken thread: "I thought I took the knife and held it out to him, and he suddenly snatched it and I felt the blade pierce my heart right through.... He said, with his dark, bright eyes on mine: 'Son of my father's enemy, I slay despots, not animals!' ... And I felt the hot blood bubbling in my throat as I answered: 'You have killed a great faith and a great love!'"

It was rhetoric of a bombastic, youthful kind, but not without pathos. His lips quivered. He nipped them together, and blinked away the stinging salt moisture that had risen in his bright eyes. Juliette said, aching to console him:

"Dreams go by contraries, according to my schoolmates of the Convent. Your friendship with M. Cavaignac will not be severed by the blade of a hunting-knife."

He shook his head.

"Or rather it is by my hand that the stab will be given.... Yet how could that be, when I like him so very, very much? ... Is it not strange, I have never spoken to Cavaignac, and yet I would have chosen him for my companion above all others, before even Espinasse or Chino Murat!..."

"I think I understand..." Juliette said, feeling the tug of his craving for affection and sympathy, realizing the loneliness that had found relief in hero-worship, and heartily pitying her Emperor's son. "When the heart speaks, one cannot shut one's ears; one must listen always.... Among hundreds of faces there is one that paints itself upon the memory ... there is one voice that makes good music when others only tire the ear.... There is one nature that seems more open, fresh, and candid than others.... Without knowing that you do so, you continually compare it with them.... And when you are sad or lonely, you would wish that person to be near you.... You remember his gray eyes with specks of brown and golden in them, and the curly hair, and the pleasant lips. You regret that when you met him you were not more charming, more amiable.... You feel chagrin to remember that you were neither of these things.... You would like to hold out the hand as they do in England, and say, 'Pardon, pardon, that I misunderstood you, my friend!'"

The boy's blue eyes rounded. His fair brows puckered in perplexity. Too well-bred to interrupt, he listened with increasing surprise.

"Pardon that I regarded you as a brusque, untidy boy, when you had been robbed, and were homeless, and suffering from hunger. For Monica's sake, you hid it. And I applaud that noble silence! I admire you with all my heart!..."

The Prince broke in:

"But Cavaignac has not been robbed, and who ever said he was hungry? He lives with Madame, his mother ... they are not rich, certainly! As Madame is a widow and he an only son, he is exempt from military service. He is to embrace the profession of Literature--he will write great books or great plays, or edit a newspaper.... And I would like to help him to climb to the very top of the ladder.... Secretly--because he would never accept anything that came from me!... Am I stupid, Mademoiselle?"

She said with warmth that covered a slight confusion, caused by that slip of the tongue an instant before:

"Ah, no, indeed! but very kind and generous. Perhaps, if it were possible, M. Cavaignac would be proud and glad to know you were his friend. It may be that the affection he inspires in you, he returns, though he does not own it. There can be no harm in thinking this, at least!"

The Prince said, with animation:

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LVI

"I saw him, I am convinced, when we left Saint-Cloud, outside the station near the Gate of Orleans. He stood apart from the soldiers and the people.... He was all in black, and had grown older and taller. He looked at me earnestly, and slightly raised his hat as the carriage drove up. I saluted in answer, and the Empress asked me: 'Who is that grave young man? Do you know him?' I said: 'My mother, I have never spoken to him in my life!' ... You would have thought the Empress very brave, if you had seen her, Mademoiselle. Nobody could have guessed she had been weeping. Though the night before we left for Metz ... when she came to me in my bed..."

His lips twitched, and one big tear brimmed over and splashed on the sleeve of his piou-piou's uniform. He flushed bright red, and whisked it off as though it were a wasp that would have stung.

"She brought me a new medal to hang on the collar I wear always." He slid a finger inside the edge of his stiff military stock, and hooked up an inch of gold chain. "It has on one side a figure of Our Blessed Lady crushing the head of the serpent, and on the other there is the Cross with two hearts. The Holy Father has blessed it; it was sent to Rome purposely.... Mothers are anxious when their sons are called upon Active Service.... It is natural, is it not?"

Juliette's eyes were wet with pity for the Empress. She bent her head in assent. The boy went on, shrugging his slender shoulders:

"For me--I like better to have soldiers about me than a lot of people in embroidered tail-coats. If I had been twenty, I should have been at Wörth with the Duke of Magenta.... I would have died at the head of my troops rather than have consented to that shameful retreat.... 'Over my body!' ... that is what I would have said to them.... 'Do you wish me to dishonor the blood of Napoleon the Great?'"

He crossed to the fireplace and stood upon the Turkey hearthrug, a boyish figure reflected in the great Venetian mirror that hung above the carved stone mantelpiece. The outpouring had relieved the nervous tension; the red flush had died out of his fair temples, the smooth forehead was no longer disfigured with a scowl.

"If I might only have remained with the Army at Metz, I would have asked nothing better. But instead of staying to fight the Prussians, we drove away when they came in sight. It was ignominious.... It made me feel horribly!... And the Emperor would not show it, but I know he suffered, too. Then the camp was beastly.... There was no pretense of discipline. Their officers could hardly restrain the mobilists. There was even mutiny among those who had returned from Alsace-Lorraine--the Algerian troops of the Army of MacMahon!"

His agitation made him stutter as the words came pouring from him.

"They wanted to be led once more against the Germans!--to be avenged for all their losses and misfortunes!... I understood why they were difficult.... They did not understand why we did not march at once to the northeast frontier. No more did I.... I was unreasonable, like them! But now we are advancing--soon, soon, you will hear something!... We will effect a junction of our Army with M. de Bazaine's, and sweep the Prussians out of France!"

He was walking up and down, swinging his arms, gesticulating, grinding his heels into the arabesques of the Aubusson carpet at every turn.

"Then there will be great popular rejoicings--the Emperor will receive his due--there will be no more misunderstandings. For the Emperor is terribly misunderstood, Mademoiselle, and he is no longer young or strong.... He has so many bitter enemies.... I have heard him say so, weeping--the Emperor, Mademoiselle!..."

"Oh, hush, Monseigneur!"

But he did not heed Juliette's entreaty.

"I have heard him crying out to God in his room at midnight, when he thought everyone was asleep, and he was quite alone: 'My God! is this the beginning of the punishment? Must the price of my success be ruin, defeat, disgrace!'... Then I stole away and made a prayer for him and for myself, Mademoiselle.... I say it regularly every night since then."

His boyish pompousness, pride, and vanity had fallen from him like a tinsel diadem. Chivalry and loyalty, unselfishness and devotion shone from and irradiated the child.

"'My God, if Thou dost save up happiness for me, I pray Thee to take it away, and give it to my father, who needs it so badly.... And, my God, if Thou indeed art angry with him, I beseech Thee to grant him Thy pardon, and punish me, instead. All I ask Thee for myself is that I may know Thy Will, and obey It, that I may do my duty bravely, and die when the end of my life comes without dishonor and without fear!' Is that a good prayer, do you think, Mademoiselle?"

Before she could command herself sufficiently to answer, there was a knock at the door, and the equerry came in. He looked eager and vexed, excited and disappointed. Varying emotions seemed to clash in him. But he said, smiling and saluting as the Prince turned toward him:

"The ten minutes are over, Monseigneur!"

"Ten minutes ago, Monsieur, to speak correctly," said Monseigneur, with a mischievous look. Then his face changed. "News!" he called out eagerly. "You have dispatches from the Emperor!... Don't play a farce with me, Count, I beg of you! when there is the telegram sticking out of your cuff!"

And with the nimbleness of a gamin and the audacity of a spoiled princeling, he threw himself upon the equerry and captured the prize.

"From the Emperor at Rheims--no! don't retire, Mademoiselle! You are discreet--not like women who talk! ... You shall share my good news with me.... He says: 'There has been furious fighting at Mars la Tour. Battles are raging at Flauville, Flavigny, and Vionville. The Prince will remain for the present at Bethel, where the Emperor will rejoin him on the 27th. As it is not considered advisable to effect a junction with Bazaine, the march of the Army of Châlons is directed upon Sedan.'"

The mischief died out of the dancing eyes, the mobile face whitened with disappointment. He repeated, staring blankly at the paper:

"For what did we leave Châlons, if not to assist Bazaine?... Mon Dieu!... What infamy!... Why am I not a man?"

He grew crimson and burst into a tempest of sobbing. He tore the pale green paper into fragments and trampled them beneath his feet. His eyes blazed through the tears that streamed from them as he stammered between his gasps and chokings:

"Cowards!... Traitors!... Disgraced forever!... Is there no honor left in France?"

"Come, Mademoiselle, in pity!" entreated the equerry, as deadly pale as Monseigneur was red. He held open the door with a shaking hand, and Juliette hurriedly quitted the drawing-room. The door shut upon the sobs and outcries. The Count said, with a sigh of relief, wiping the perspiration from his face:

"You will not speak of this? His Imperial Highness is overwrought and excited. It will pass presently. Let me conduct you downstairs!"

The hall of the Prefecture reached, a servant in the livery of the establishment approached the equerry. It appeared that the lady who had accompanied Mademoiselle had recovered from her indisposition, and departed, leaving no message for her young friend.

"Madame will have returned to her hotel," said the equerry. He added: "By chance, Mademoiselle, the dispatches we have just received contain proof that your friend has been misled by false intelligence. Colonel le Bayard has not been taken prisoner. He is now in command of his regiment with the First Brigade of Cavalry of General Clérambault's Division, now engaged with the Third Corps in the neighborhood of Metz."

Then as Juliette turned red and pale, and looked at him in breathless questioning, he added, pulling a vestibule-chair from its place near the wainscot and making her sit down:

"Rest there one moment.... I will speak to Colonel Watrin. He is now at mess with his officers in the Prefect's billiard-room."

Watrin of the Bodyguard, Chief of the Prince Imperial's escort, came clanking and jingling from his dinner to confirm the fact as stated by the equerry. The 777th Chasseurs, belonging to de Clérambault's Division of the Third Corps of the Army of Bazaine, were certainly now engaged in the neighborhood of Gravelotte. But as certainly they had not come into contact with the enemy previously to the fifteenth of the month.

The fifteenth!--the very day on which Adelaide had baited her trap with an imprisoned father.... Joy at the discovery, indignation at having been so easily cajoled into captivity, brought back the red to Juliette's pale cheeks and the light to her sad eyes.

This strange, wayward, mysterious mother might exercise over her daughter a certain degree of maternal authority. The supreme obedience, the first duty was to the father, that was clear. Now she was going straight to him, wherever he might be. She was strong enough, for his dear sake, to take whatever risks were involved.

Suppose Adelaide insisted on accompanying her? It was unthinkable that even so hardy an offender should venture into the presence of one so wronged.... Meet his look!... Read in his face his scorn of perfidy! Juliette put away the possibility from her with both hands.

We know that Madame Adelaide had contemplated this very move upon occasion. But she had not met Mademoiselle de Bayard then. Since the encounter had taken place she had realized that the establishment of maternal influence, strong enough to make of her daughter a confederate and ally, was a task beyond her powers.

Her grace, her charm, were lost upon this pale, frigid, obstinate little being, in whom she saw her mother-in-law over again. For than this girl, sprung of her own flesh, whose veins were filled with her blood, nothing could be more unlike Adelaide, that magnificent creature of impulses and desires and appetites....

Dominion over de Bayard could never be regained and established while his daughter sat by his hearth a virgin unwed. Why had Adelaide hindered her marriage to M. Tessier? Pacing the Turkey carpet of the Prefect's library, Madame admitted that she had acted inadvisedly. That the plan of bringing Juliette into contact with the Prince Imperial would be discounted by the innocence of the girl and the inexperience of the boy.

She could imagine the dialogue they were holding at that moment, all, "Oh, Mademoiselle!" and "Ah, Monseigneur!"... The girl should have been permitted to celebrate her nuptials with this dull young husband of her father's choosing.... Then a few years later would have come the opportunity. She ground her teeth, thinking how her precipitation had spoiled everything ... thrust her.... Ah, Heaven! how one shuddered at the recollection, almost into the clutches of the Wielder of the Bowstring, the ingenious inventor of the Ordeal of the Looking-Glass....

Straz.... At the sight of him her heart had stopped beating. In imagination those strangling silken folds had closed, shutting out light and breath....

How he had leered, rolling those fierce black eyes of his. "So," his jeering smile had said, "my Sultana and her slave have met again. Did I not prophesy truly, sweet one, tell me? when I said you would never again look in your toilette-mirror without remembering me!"

Her nerves were raveled to threads--her will was weakening.... Despite her hatred and her overwhelming fear of the man, she knew that he was her master. That if he fixed those eyes upon her and beckoned Come! she would have to obey....

Was he still here? The book-lined walls seemed closing in on her. The atmosphere was suffocating ... she must escape from this place or go mad.

The Prefect's wife had been called away, after kindly ministrations with smelling-salts and red lavender. Adelaide opened the library door a little way, and looked forth cautiously. Except the two Cent Gardes on duty at the foot of the principal staircase, there was nobody stirring in the hall or vestibule.

As she told herself so, a red baize-covered door at a flagged rear passage-end was opened. The Prince's equerry came out with the Chief of the Bodyguard, an oblong pale green paper was in the equerry's hand. Both officers' faces were pale. Colonel Watrin's was livid and distorted with emotion. He said to his companion in a low voice, and with a despairing gesture:

"It needed but this to hasten the catastrophe!... All is over!... The Empire is lost!"

Then he went back. The red baize door shut upon him. The equerry came through the passage, entered the hall, and went quickly up the stairs. He was going to break to the Emperor's son the news of some terrible disaster ... to say to him, as Watrin had said: "All is over!... The Empire is lost!"

With all a woman's intuition, Adelaide leaped at the truth and comprehended the situation. What did she in the galley of a ruined, sinking Empire? What advantage was to be gained by reconciliation with Henri de Bayard now? And with Straz in the neighborhood, what madness to remain here....

As for the girl, she was possessed of money. Let her go to her father, or to her friends, or elsewhere....

So Adelaide went out into the hall, still haunted by horrible memories of the Roumanian. She found the porter. He hailed her fiacre from its waiting-place. Madame stepped in gracefully, and was jingled away, straight into the jaws of Straz!

"Mademoiselle is courageous," commented the Chief of the Escort when Juliette's determination to seek the shelter of her Colonel shaped itself in a request for a military pass, a thing without which nobody could penetrate the immediate area where the dreadful thing called War was actually going on. The speaker resumed:

"The Cavalry Camp of the Third Corps is at present at Châtel St. Germain.... Provided Mademoiselle gets there without accident, and can endure the noise of the bombardments--Mademoiselle may be quite as safe"--he shrugged and twirled his imperial--"there as anywhere else!..."

A little vague, more than a little doubtful, considering the huge conflict then waging, that was to wage until nightfall of the morrow, between the Imperial Army of Metz and the First and Second Armies of Germany. But the permit was written and signed with a flourish, and gracefully handed over to the keeping of Mademoiselle. Then she thanked Colonel Watrin and went away, declining the attendance of the servant whom the officer would have sent with her, and descended the steps of the Prefecture under the raking eyes of the crowd....

For, owing to a mysterious leakage in Imperial dispatches, something approaching to a panic was brewing.... The Place of the Prefecture was packed with people ... the news of the frightful struggle near Metz was buzzing from mouth to mouth. It was whispered that defeat was certain, that M. de Bismarck had a secret understanding with M. de Bazaine.... Later on, when peasants who had hurried in from villages on the outskirts, stragglers who had quitted the Army at the commencement of its misfortunes, soldiers who had deserted from the Colors in action, came flocking into the town; despite the presence of the Bodyguard and the gendarmerie, and the local Fire-Brigade, an attack upon the Imperial party at the Prefecture was anticipated; so threatening became the attitude of the people, egged on by those among them who were agents and spies of the enemy.

Perhaps the arrival of the Emperor would throw oil upon the troubled waters. Perhaps it would be wiser to warn him not to come. Well might the officers who guarded the person of the Heir of a crumbling Empire groan under the burden of their responsibilities. Well might the Prefect perspire, to the ruin of his collars and cravats.

It may be imagined that the lack of Adelaide's company did not greatly depress Mademoiselle de Bayard, as, cheered by her interview and armed with her permit, she tripped through the crowded streets to the Hotel of the Crown, where they had spent the previous night.

"Madame had already returned," said the respectable Frenchwoman in charge of the bureau. "She gave notice of departure, and asked for the account. Then the gentleman arrived--a handsome man with splendid eyes, brilliant as carbuncles, and hair and beard--my faith! what hair and what a beard! Madame cried out with ravishment upon his entrance, for he would not be announced--he went up at once. Possibly it was Madame's husband, or some near relative?"

Juliette made some ambiguous reply to the question. She was intent upon the problem of rescuing her traveling-bag. Without money one could not reach Châtel St. Germain, and in the bag was her little store of cash. Trembling, she crept upstairs to the room she had slept in, a dressing or maid's apartment, opening out of Madame's. The discovery that the door was locked and the key in Adelaide's possession was appalling. She was delivered from the dilemma by a chambermaid with a master-key. As she stole in and seized her bag she heard voices in the next room. Certainly one was Adelaide's and the other male. A thickish voice, speaking with a drawl and a muffled softness that somehow recalled the Assyrian hawk-features and fierce black eyes of Straz.

"When the little Queen of Diamonds comes," the voice said, "you shall present me!" And a chuckle followed on the words that made her cold. Fortunately, some noise in the corridor covered her retreat with her rescued property, and facilitated her departure unobserved from the Hotel of the Crown....

The station was near enough to be reached in a few minutes. She learned there that a train would leave in ten minutes for Verdun. At Verdun she would have to change, provided the branch-line trains were running, or proceed to Châtel St. Germain by road.

Those ten minutes expanded into hours as the girl sat in the dirty station, waiting. She was escaping from even greater perils than she had feared, and yet when she found herself actually in the train, and the train moving out of Bethel, she knew a moment of passionate regret.

She had been so happy there.... She would never forget, even though she lived to be an old, old woman, that half-hour spent in easy, confidential talk with her Imperial Prince.

The littered third-class carriage expanded, became the formal drawing-room of the Prefecture.... Lingeringly Mademoiselle went over the interview, and the parting--ah, me! there had been no farewell!... And yet, upon the step of departure, standing upon the muddy curbstone of the Place, full of soldiers and scowling people, she had looked wistfully up at the row of four big round-topped shining windows on the balconied first floor of the Prefecture and seen...

Only a boy's face, blurred and stained with crying. Only a boy's hand, waved behind the pane. As she whispered "Adieu!" looking up at him with passionate love and loyalty, she wondered if ever they two would meet on earth again.

It was to be never again for the boy and girl whose chivalrous and noble natures had struck out, at first meeting, the white spark that kindles to Friendship's sacred flame.

What misfortunes were coming, thick and fast, upon the luckless child of the Empire!... What a cup of dreadful judgment was to be offered to those guiltless lips!...

So young, so noble, so unfortunate! The pity of it!... He who might have breathed new life into the dry bones of the Napoleonic Legend, and given France an Emperor without fear and without reproach.

What a string of waking nightmares, the days that were to follow!... That journey by road to Mézières ... that brief sojourn at Sedan. The sudden flight to Avesnes, where the guns could be heard thundering, betokening the defeat of a demoralized, dejected army, conquered almost before the shock of battle, paralyzed by the premonition of inevitable disaster, as much as by the perfect preparedness, the masterly strategy, and the overwhelming numbers of the enemy....

From Landrécies to Maubeuge follow the boy sorrowfully....

What an hour was that when his protectors stripped him of his darling uniform, dressed him in civilian garments, took him out by the hotel back-door, and smuggled him into the omnibus that was to convey him to Belgian ground.

His father a prisoner, his mother a fugitive, crowds hustling him in their curiosity to see the son of the toppled Napoleon, what wonder that the memory of that journey haunted him his brief life long.

He was to attain manhood in exile. Transplanted to the soil of a foreign country, he was to develop into the beau-ideal of a youthful King among men. High-minded, pure-hearted, excelling in manly sports and martial exercises, the soul of honor, the fine flower of French chivalry. And in the spring of his manhood he was to die by the assegais of savage warriors, leaving nothing behind him but the broken heart of a mother, some fragrant memories, and the undying story of that lion's life-and-death fight among the trodden grasses on the banks of the Imbazani.

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